In my
Korean 301 class, we have various assignments where we need to change Korean
words (Hangul) to English letters so that we know how a word is pronounced.
We call this “Romanization.” Romanization in its definition it “to transcribe or
transliterate (a language) into the Roman alphabet” (thefreedictionary.com). For
any language that does not have a Latin-based root, such as Chinese, Korean,
Japanese, Arabic, and a number of others, they can be written in Latin-based letters, or English, based
on their sounds.
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| That says, "English Notations of Hangul" |
When I
first started learning Korean, I found it easier to read the letters themselves
instead of the Romanized version of them. Now, reading Romanized Korean just
gives me a headache because I am basically reading two languages at once. I
would rather just read the actual Korean letters, and not have them written out
in English.
Sometimes the Romanized version of a word can be ambiguous, depending on the language. A
very common Korean last name is “이”
(pronounced “ee”). This last name, when Romanized, is “Lee” most of the time,
but is also Romanized as “Ree” and “I.”
I am not
trying to degrade what the Romans did for us in terms of Romanization, because
the Romanization of languages helps when you cannot pronounce a certain word. I
may not like reading Korean when it is Romanized, but it sure helped me when I
was learning the Korean alphabet for the first time.
I faced this when I was taking Japanese, too. Personally, I found that Romanization was really helpful at times so that I could comprehend characters and words, but more confusing at other times when there were different sounds and inflections that can't exactly be communicated through the Romanized spelling.
ReplyDeleteThat is an interesting idea. We already talked about how limiting writing is to language, and it only makes sense that by using a different system to write, then it would just mess things up more. The Latin system was made for Latin languages, not Asian ones.
ReplyDeleteEast is east and west is west and never the two shall meet. Trying to romanize Korean is like trying to eat 김치 with a fork. The cost of standardization is that we have to force some things into an unnatural form to fit the mold.
ReplyDelete