User talk:KYPark/transcription

Transcription

Hi, thank you for your contributions. A point with regard to Korean: here we are following the w:Revised Romanization of Korean of 2000. This means that 락 is transliterated "rak", etc. —Stephen 00:08, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

Hi, Steve. I'm so sorry to have caused you so much trouble to correct all my unfortunate Romanizations. I understand Wiktionary should adopt a certain Romanization system, say, RR instead of MR and others, however damaging it might be. Unfortunately, however, all such systems so far mainly aim to romanize Korean proper names in isolation rather than agglutinating or conjugating words in context. They adopt a radical reductionism, ignoring linguistic dynamism of the Korean language. Such is not linguistics, I am afraid. As a result of RR, you have to bother explaining why garak should suddenly become garag before /e/, for example. Such stupid transliteration should and could be avoided easily! I'm not quite sure, but RR already has such an allowance, as suggested here. Anyway, I hate any Roman transliteration more ambiguous than Hangul. Simply it is hard for me to accept why rag (락) and rak (랔) should be the same, whatever each may be. Whatever would insist so would be rubbish, I should say.

The w:Revised Romanization of Korean doesn’t seem to suffer from that defect. While a final "ㄱ" in Korean does not change form in different environments, the transcription of it does change. For example, 한국 = hanguk, but 한국어 = hangugeo; 벽 = byeok, but 벽에 = byeoge. Some letters have other transcriptions; e.g., 고맙습니다 = gomapseumnida (not gomapseubnida). The Korean stops are only written with "p-t-k" when they are NOT followed by a vowel or semivowel: e.g., 밖 → bak, 밖에 → bakke; 부엌 = bueok, 부엌에 = bueoke. —Stephen 17:25, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

The Wiki article you suggest, Revised Romanization of Korean, is not fully informative. So, to supplement yours, I previously suggested another article, Korean romanization#Examples, whose third column "RR (RR transliteration in brackets)" suggests the strict transliteration rather than normal transcription provision, from the least ambiguity perspective! This exceptional but rational provision is exactly what Wiki should adopt, I insist. Or, I resist. The following is excerpted from The Romanization of Korean by its originator, Ministry of Culture and Tourism, RoK:

(8) When it is necessary to convert Romanized Korean back to Hangeul in special cases such as in academic articles, Romanization is done according to Hangeul spelling and not pronunciation. Each Hangeul letter is Romanized as explained in section 2 except that ㄱ, ㄷ, ㅂ, ㄹ are always written as g, d, b, l. When ㅇ has no sound value, it is replaced by a hyphen may also be used when it is necessary to distinguish between syllables.

e.g.

집 jib  
짚 jip 

밖 bakk 
값 gabs 

붓꽃 buskkoch 
먹는 meogneun 

독립 doglib 
문리 munli 

물엿 mul-yeos 
굳이 gud-i 

좋다 johda 
가곡 gagog 

조랑말 jolangmal 
없었습니다 eobs-eoss-seubnida 

--KYPark 09:23, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes, but the only reason for this special case is to allow easy and accurate retransliteration into Korean. Here in Wiktionary, the Korean Romanizations are always accompanied by the actual Korean spelling, and therefore we do not have any need to worry about or allow for re-Koreanization. The Romanization that you like to use is needed when the actual Korean spelling is absent, but here we always give the Korean letters. The very same problem crops up with the transcription of almost every script (Russian, Arabic, Amharic, Greek, etc.), but we completely avoid the problem here by always giving the word in its correct script, and so we only need a Romanization that is easy to type and that is helpful with the pronunciation. —Stephen 21:14, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

You are supposed to support user-centrism as the mainstream in most disciplines, not to mention postmodernism claiming "the death of the author." We will not confine ourselves to the explicit literal meaning. Implicitly, we are allowed to apply the exact transliteration whenever we need it indeed. It would be very unwise for Wiktionary to presuppose for what the reader should use the Romanization, say, for somewhat easier pronunciation. Korean words may always be shown together with the Romanization, as you said. Nevertheless, all the readers may not read them for one reason after another. Some of them may even try to learn Korean relying on the Romanization only, not without reason and feasibility, at least in the beginning. Phonetically speaking, Hangul is not perfectly consistent, though very well designed for Korean in general. The consonants sound different depending on the context. Transcription is one thing, and the actual pronunciation is another, to be precise. Of course, the Romanization needs to help pronounce Korean as easily and correctly as possible. But that should not be the whole story, I should say. Such an insistence may sacrifice so many other crucial things, e.g., enormous confusion and ambiguity caused by inconsistent Roman spelling in agglutination and conjugation. It reminds me of the Western "phonocentrism" Jacques Derrida criticized and even ridiculed so bitterly. One more regrettable thing worth remembering is that English is great not because of the most irregular transcription. Native English speakers may not understand how much others love an easy if not easiest transcription. Please help the Romanized Korean not to look crazy! --KYPark 09:49, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

I have explained to you the transliteration that we are using here for Korean, and I have explained why. I am not going to argue anymore about it. If you don’t use the approved system as I have described it, your transcriptions will all have to be changed, which is double the effort. —Stephen 15:42, 2 September 2006 (UTC)