[KS] Revised Romanization Detailed Guidelines?

[Brother Anthony]

Charles Muller writes: " If an official Korean governmental or academic organization would take the time to carry out an equivalent effort just once, much could be resolved."

Alas, rather too much experience makes me want to write, rather, "If an official Korean governmental or academic organization took the time to carry out an equivalent effort, far greater confusion would result." The Korean side simply cannot see the problems and cannot therefore see the need to solve them, and would not be likely to propose satisfactory solutions in any case. This is a task for non-Koreans who are determined to make RR work in the long run and are therefore prepared to reflect on the unresolved issues, just as LOC did for MR. Certainly the issues of word-division and hyphenation in excessively lengthy polysyllabic words, as well as clear indications of syllable breaks in ambiguous cases (jung'ang / jun'gang etc) would be topics for fruitful discussion. Also the unresolved question of whether Korean given names should be hyphenated or not . . .

People have mentioned the question of the spelling of proper names. The simple fact is that very many Koreans fiercely demand the right to romanize their names in whatever way they see fit, as a basic human right. Names in passports were romanized (at least until recently, now I do not know) by the individual applying for one in whatever way they wished, and once a passport had been issued no change was possible (this has now been changed). People using a non-systematic name in their passport and a correctly romanized one in other documents get into serious legal trouble overseas because it is impossible to believe that Park Chung-hee might be the same person as Bak Jeonghui.

Just as MR had a single explicit exception for the family name Yi (not to be spelled Lee), common usage suggests that similar exceptions would have to be made if anyone wants to provide more precise guidelines for RR, regarding Kim and kimchi which are never going to be written Gim and gimchi.

The initial negative reaction to RR was largely centered on the use of 'eo' for the short 'o' but since no obvious, convincing alternative (excluding diacritics) has ever been proposed that I know of, we seem to have got used to it.

Just a few thoughts

Brother Anthony
President, RAS Korea etc