[KS] Koreanstudies Digest, Vol 128, Issue 56

Sangoak Lee sangoak2 at gmail.com
Fri Feb 28 04:52:47 EST 2014


If those ? & ? (in my monitor screen) are nothing but German umlaut sounds
in Korean standard vowels, I may report my own Seoulite pronunciation as
examples. I will be 70 soon and have pronounced pwi, twi/tyi, chyi, kyi [wi
as diphthongs & yi close to umlauted u]. This tendency was also witnessed
by Lee Hui Seung, another near-Seoulite scholar, in his "Introduction to
Korean Linguistics" written about 60 years ago. He came from Paju, just in
the north of Seoul, and I am an offspring of pure Seoulite all through
Chosun Dynasty. My old house is preserved in Namsan Hanok maeul as a tea
house built by the master carpenter who also built the Gyeongbok Palace.
In short, even Seoulite never pronounced front rounded vowels all in umlaut
but only non-labial ones are umlauted in recent years. Now more
diphthongized into wi. Likewise [we] than umlauted o.
Sang-Oak Lee


2014-02-28 16:18 GMT+09:00 <koreanstudies-request at koreanstudies.com>:

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> Today's Topics:
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>    1. Re: Variable Romanization of ?(?) in McCune-Reischauer
>       (Frank Hoffmann)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
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> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2014 21:57:00 -0800
> From: Frank Hoffmann <hoffmann at koreanstudies.com>
> To: Korean Studies Discussion List <koreanstudies at koreanstudies.com>
> Subject: Re: [KS] Variable Romanization of ?(?) in McCune-Reischauer
> Message-ID: <20140227215700083787.933bb740 at koreanstudies.com>
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>
> A side note (not about the actual sound but the transcription):
>
> The scholar who brought in the "?" was not a German but an American:
> Homer B. Hulbert.
> See e.g. this notation example in a short article from 1896 about
> Arirang and "Korean Vocal Music":
>
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> This is from p. 51 of:
> H.B. Hulbert, "Korean Vocal Music," _The Korean Repository_ 3, no. 2
> (February 1896): 45-53.
> See also p. 52 ... online version here:
> https://archive.org/stream/koreanrepositor00unkngoog#page/n80/mode/2up
> (Thanks to Rob Provine for pointing me to this article, in a different
> context.)
>
> James Scarth Gale also uses "?" and "?" -- BOTH times for ? though.
>
> The IPA had "just" then been created but probably not known then to
> Hulbert -- and Hulbert was not a linguist or language scholar in any
> case. It could just be that Hulbert and others use "the next best"
> solution then. For Charles Dallet (1874) as a French native speaker
> that had been "o?" for ? and for Hulbert the sound may simply have
> reminded him remotely of the German "?" -- doesn't have to mean the
> actual pronunciation he was familiar with -- in Seoul, not Kangw?n-do.
> As seen from a foreign learner of Korean, as Werner pointed out, seeing
> the "?" and "?" in textbooks would then have easily created a
> life-long mispronunciation. In my third semester I had the honor to
> participate in a fun "reading course" in Classical Chinese with Werner
> Eichhorn, a Sinologist and religious scholar who was already 86 years
> old at the time (1985). He only accepted three students per course,
> simply because he did not have more chairs in his living room. Eichhorn
> had a very special, rather anarchic way of interpreting the Classics,
> and that did beautifully correspond with his own personal life style
> (he lived unmarried with his girlfriend in the most conservative
> Catholic area one can possibly find in southern Germany) ... but these
> stories aside: he always said, "I don't speak any Chinese,
> unfortunately, that is something for you guys to learn and teach me,
> but my Wade-Giles is not from bad parents!" In this sense ...
>
>
> Best,
> Frank
>
>
>
> --------------------------------------
> Frank Hoffmann
> http://koreanstudies.com
>
> End of Koreanstudies Digest, Vol 128, Issue 56
> **********************************************
>



-- 
이상억 Sang-Oak Lee/www.sangoak.com
Prof. Emeritus, Dep't of Korean
College of Humanities, Seoul Nat'l Univ.
Seoul 151-745, Korea
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