[KS] -열 / -렬 (question to linguists & Korean native speakers)

[Dr. Edward D. Rockstein]

Names were sidestepped in the ROK government's guidelines to their revised Romanization which, IMO, exacerbated rather ameliorated one of the most pressing issues of transcription. Moreover, the online guidelines disappeared from digital realm a year or so ago. Too much political heat in the kitchen, I'd guess.

Dr. Edward D. Rockstein 

ed4linda at yahoo.com   

"The highest function of ecology is understanding consequences." Pardot Kynes


--- On Wed, 11/30/11, Frank Hoffmann <hoffmann at koreaweb.ws> wrote:

From: Frank Hoffmann <hoffmann at koreaweb.ws>
Subject: [KS] -열 / -렬 (question to linguists & Korean native speakers)
To: koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws
Date: Wednesday, November 30, 2011, 12:07 PM

Dear All:

In between all the big topics, here a small detail question, a question mostly to native speakers of Korean and linguists:

I know, we all know, that in the North they always use the harder variation for the pronunciation of certain syllables (resp. Han'gŭl rendering of Chinese charcters): 리 Ri instead of 이 Yi, 력사 ryŏksa instead of 역사 yŏksa, and so on. So far so good.

But the following case that just came up confuses me--this is about the usage in SOUTH Korea only:
金昌烈 -- a well established painter in South Korea, born in 1929, known for his modernist brush-and-ink paintings, usually showing water drops.
You find most websites giving his name in Han'gŭl as 김찰열 (Kim Ch'angyŏl). But maybe about one third of websites or entries in encyclopedias give it as 김창렬 (Kim Ch'angnyŏl). [This is unrelatd to how he himself transcribes his name into Latin script.]

Can anyone explain the situation? Are there any rules in South Korea (for names), and if not, if this is up to every individual to decide (which is my impression, thus far), then how come that with such a prominent name we still see these variations? And finally, how do you handle such cases when you refer to such people (where there are such variations ... again, I just talk about Han'gŭl variations, not transcription systems)?

Thanks for your input!

Frank


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