Talk:Wonhyo

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[edit] Not 'Weonhyo'

The name is not romanised as 'Weonhyo' in any of the widely used systems. Note that in Revised Romanisation, 'ㅝ' is written as 'wo'. So I've moved the page back to Wonhyo. --Iceager 06:40, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Page move

At the request of DoctorW, I moved the page Weonhyo to Wonhyo, having first deleted the page Wonhyo, which had no history except for a redirect to Weonhyo. I understand that Wonhyo is the correct spelling. I have no particular interest in this issue, so would be happy to move the page back again, if this move proves to be unpopular with those who normally edit it.

I was unable to move the talkpage of Weonhyo, to the Wonhyo talkpage, as the latter already existed. I was nervous of overwriting the page, which would have caused the page history to be destroyed. So, for the moment, I'll just say that everything I have done is reversible. If anyone wants me to undo anything, please let me know.

I am moving the contents of the Weonhyo talk page to this talk page. Note that this will not merge the histories of the two pages, but neither will it destroy either of them. I am not going to attempt to delete this page and then move the Weonhyo talk page here, as that would mess up the history of this page. Nevertheless, the content that I am moving is not of large amount, and the old talkpage, which will redirect here, will retain the history of those posts that I am moving here. Please leave a message on my talk page if you would like anything to be undone. Thank you. AnnH (talk) 00:17, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

Someone has been moving this to the listing of Wonhyo, which is not correct in any official romanization of the term. If we only had McCune-Reischauer, we may have no choice but to normalize with ASCII in Wikipedia, but since the new romanization system lets us get by without diacritics, let's take advantage of this and romanize these names with precision. User:Acmuller

Although it's not a big deal in my opinion, Wonhyo is correct under the Revised Romanization of Korean. "wo" is the standard romanization of the diphthong "워". See the lists provided by Cheongwadae [1] and Wikisource [2]. The reason for using "wo" rather than "weo," I presume, is that there is no risk of ambiguity. Korean phonology and Hangul formation rules alike forbid an 오 from directly following a w-sound. Visviva 14:57, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Muller uses the same aberration from RR in his dictionary. I pointed it out to him, but he claims writing weo provides "a greater level of precision". As you have already pointed out, there is no ambiguity in any case, no matter whether you write weo or wo. I guess wo was chosen to make words shorter.
I really like Muller's dictionary, and he can make up any set of rules he likes for that, but WP uses RR, so I am going to have a look at his contributions for this kind of error. Wikipeditor 13:46, 19 October 2005 (UTC)
Muller is not following RR. The only reason to follow RR in the first place is to bow to the Korean government (and its political intrigue and pride) rather than the system that virtually all Korean scholars (and others familiar with the issues involved) use, McR. In the case of "Wonhyo" (the only spelling I have ever seen in my decades of work in this area) there is agreement between RR and McR, but Muller prefers his own spelling. Is Muller (or anyone else on Wikipedia) aware that RR's rendering of the underlying pure vowel (taken directly from the defunct and ridiculed MRE system) was a historical mistake based on an erroneous assumption about the French spelling of 서울 as se-oul (which Koreans incorrectly assumed was seo-ul)? (reported in an academic journal edited by David McCann; I believe it was The Journal of Korean Studies). I will have to get the contents of that article and post in on Wikipedia; it seems that many of the egregious shortcomings of RR have never been discussed. Even so, there is no question as to the proper spelling of "Wonhyo." -DoctorW 21:52, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

And that is the end of the part that I have moved. AnnH (talk) 00:17, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

P.S. Muller and many others on Wikipedia seem also not to be aware that the diacritics/superscripts of McR can be left off whenever it is inconvenient or impossible to include them. It would obviously be extremely unwise to include them in Wikipedia entry names. (It still leaves the reader with a far less misleading - not to mention cumbersome - spelling than MOE/RR.) So both RR and McR would spell this entry "Wonhyo." -DoctorW 07:31, 26 November 2005 (UTC)