Talk:Jeolla dialect

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Korea, a project to build and improve articles related to Korea. We invite you to join the project and contribute to the discussion.
	???	This article has not yet been assigned a rating on the quality scale.
	???	This article has not yet been assigned a rating on the importance scale.

[edit] Nonstandard Pronunciation

This is a bit of a soapbox of mine. Korean when Romanized should be written in such a way that the naive English speaker has a reasonable chance of pronouncing it correctly. In this particular case, though, the subject is a spoken dialect, one which is rarely written, and never written by educated people. I've seen a middle-school educated young woman write a note using dialect, but in general it's strictly an oral dialect. So one is Romanizing something that is spoken. Therefore, I try to go for the best English phonetization. --Dan 16:32, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Agreed, I see absolutely no reason to eliminate the existing English phoneticizations in the article (since many people can't really read IPA). It would just be nice to have the IPA alongside them. cab 21:25, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

It would be better to Romanize the way it's written in Hangeul. And don't say it's never written--how do hicks talk in manhwa, if people don't write Jeolla dialect?

The problem is, anglicization that makes sense to one person may not make sense to another. For instance, there are "ay"s and "ee"s all over this article. Is that "ay" the "ay" in say, or in Satay? As pronounced by what, an American? An Australian? An Englishman? And is that "ee" a long-vowel "e", like the Japanese word that means "Yeah," or the sound of an IPA "i", like the second-most common Korean surname?

The article on Gyeongsang dialect is a good model, I think.71.223.169.27 10:57, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Ok, thanks for the IPA cleanup, User 71.223.169.27. I Anglicized to my ear, frankly, so consider it pronunciation for your standard American English speaker. While I understand your point, nevertheless I contend that most English speakers will get it right if they see "-raoo" rather than "-rau", for example. Further, I did not say the dialect is never written. But that's just a nitpick. My soapbox, however, still stands - "Korean when Romanized should be written in such a way that the naive English speaker has a reasonable chance of pronouncing it correctly." --Dan 16:25, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

I didn't say you said that; when people say "And don't say X," they usually mean, "If you're thinking to make that argument, don't, and I will tell you why." The native English speaker (of which I am one) can look up Revised Romanization if it confuses him, like I did a year or two ago. But my telepathic powers feel a little off lately, so I can't tell what sounds you were thinking of. That's the whole point of having standardizations.

Also, are you sure your accent is "standard"? I'm from Arizona, and until I was 17 or so I didn't realize I had an accent, relative to "standard" American--but I do, actually a fairly thick one (a bit like a Texan). Are you sure you don't? 71.223.169.27 03:58, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

My rant about hangul romanization is its roots (do McHune and Reischauer sound like Korean names to you?) and its attempt to equate precise Korean letters to imprecise Roman ones. Even more irritating is propensity to put up raod signs and such around the country in these awful Romanizations. The result is a code, which IMHO is useless for the naive English speaker. I still have memories of helping out befuddled American GIs who were bravely traveling around the country by bus and were trying to figure out how to ask someone when the next bus to Daegu was - and from the spelling you can guess how they mangled it. Hangul is a beautiful phonetic alphabet, and my wife can teach it to anyone in a half-hour - I've seen her do it many a time. You do have a point about my accent- it's all over the place. I grew up in Van Nuys, going to private schools where I was taught by a variety of newly immigrated, mostly European, teachers, spent high school & college in Indiana, then joined the Peace Corps where I would often go months without speaking or hearing English, followed by a 2 year stint in Appalachia, followed by graduate studies under an advisor from the Isle of Wight, UK. At one point during that time I was working all day with my advisor then going home & talking Korean with my wife. I went over to another department to talk with someone at the end of that week - the person was from Oxford - and she listened to me intently during the conversation and then at the end asked, "You're from the Inner Hebrides, right?" So yes, maybe not standard American. --Dan 22:09, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Hangul is a phonemic alphabet, not a phonetic alphabet (no such thing can exist, or every individual would have to create one for his personal ideolect). If it was phonetic, it would not use the same letter for voiced and unvoiced labial stops, since they are in fact different things. It does, though--because Korean does not distinguish those sounds (as English does not distinguish tense and lax labial stops, which Korean does). And actuallly, Roman is a perfectly phonemic alphabet for writing Classical Latin, although, like Hangul, it didn't mark vowel length even though it matters as much in Latin as it does in nearly all dialects of Korean. That, incidentally, proves that Hangul is not phonetic, because it actually omits an important phonemic trait of Korean. Anyway, Roman wasn't created to write English; it was adapted, as Chinese was adapted to write Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese.

All Romanization schemes are codes--but so's Hangul, and every other system of writing humans have ever conceived of. What a person from Busan will say reading a word and what a person from Seoul will say are two very different things (to say nothing of P'yŏngyang), and the scholars who created the alphabet would hardly recognize its modern form. All that matters is that the sounds they make when they read it agree enough for them to understand each other.

If Korean words are to be accurately represented to anyone who does not read hangul, they will have to rendered in some agreed-upon form. For the sake of convenience, it's best if the arbitrary code chosen be similar to a set of sounds that is familiar to many people. At the moment, that's the Roman alphabet as pronounced by American English, and the Revised Romanization is most likely to be correctly, or at least comprehensibly, pronounced by an English speaker, with a little coaching.

Personally I like McCune-Reischauer's vowel notation, because the RR's "eo" and "eu" are too easy to mistake for two syllables, but RR's consonants--I tend to interpret MR's "hard breathings" as glottal stops, because that's what that character is used for in Navajo and romanized Arabic. But using one somewhat flawed system is better than mixing two arbitrarily, and making one up out of your head is almost completely worthless.

If it is that important to you to not to use the Romanization systems, why not write the Jeolla-dialect variants in hangul, and let someone else write the Romanizations? Nagakura shin8 07:27, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] References or Sources.

TO User CalforniaAliBaba, I would welcome suggestions for references or sources on this topic - my guess is it's maybe covered in Korean language texts, and even there it might be sparse, since these dialects are frowned upon. What I have descibed is from my own observations while living in Hwasun Eup in South Jeolla Province for a couple of years. --Dan 21:15, 13 March 2007 (UTC)