I really can't say that goddamn name. It's like a tongue twister for me.
When I saw the village name Yeonpoong-myeon in Korean for the first time (연풍면), I was sure it was a Buddhist term: lotus-wind-village (蓮風面/연풍면). Then I looked the name up in Chinese, and it was not 蓮/연/yeon/lotus + 風/풍/poong/wind + 面/면/myeon/village or district. Instead, it was 延豐面—same sounds, totally different characters (except the third character). But even after looking at the Google Translate rendering of the Korean-dictionary definitions of these characters, I'm still not sure how best to render them in English, so someone more conversant than I am can leave a comment and set me straight.
For the character 延/연/yeon, Naver's definition is translated as:
2. lay out, spread out
3. attract, attract
4. Bring in
5. Lead, lead (引導--)
6. Connect with each other (通--)
7. Expand, spread
8. To go crazy (to reach a certain line such as spatial distance or level), to go crazy, to reach
9. Long, long lasting
10. Delayed(遲滯--)
11. High
12. Far, length, width
13. Length
14. Area
15. Crown cover
For the character 豐/풍/poong, Naver's definition is translated as:
2. Name of the trigram (卦)
3. Cup stand (a vessel used to hold a drinking glass)
4. Cattail (perennial herb of the Cattail family), cattail (annual herb of the Cyperaceae family)
5. A good harvest
6. Lush, lush (茂盛--)
7. prosper (盛--: full of energy or power), prosper
8. Thick
9. Lively (fleshy and sturdy), voluptuous (豐滿--)
10. Plenty
11. Abundant (豐盛--)
12. Full
13. Big
And for the character 面/면/myeon, the only one I guessed right, the definition was:
2. Expression, facial color
3. Shape, appearance
4. External, surface
5. Pretense
6. Mask, mask
7. In front, in front of you
8. Direction, side
9. Plane
10. Myeon (administrative district unit)
11. Myeon (unit of counting items)
12. Flour
13. Barley flour
14. Noodles
15. Meet
16. Face to face (對面--)
17. Turn your back, turn away (外面--)
18. Head(向--)
19. Face (-面: one of the minor parts)
I hadn't realized that this was the same myeon meaning "face" (see definitions 1, 3, 4, 8), as when you talk about the front and back sides of a piece of paper (앞면/ap-myeon [front], 뒷면/dween-myeon [back]; in French, these are le recto and le verso), but there we are: the character means "face" or "side," and it also means something like "village" or "district," often when applied to very small towns.
So how do we translate this mess? Full disclosure: I'm not a certified translator of any languages, not even French to English, despite being highly competent in French, so I don't know all the ins and outs of translation. That's Charles's department; he was and is a professional translator who has taught translation courses and done translation work for government folks and other bigwigs. At a guess, I'd go with the first definition or so of each character (except for myeon, which is definitely definition #10 in this context), which gives us this maybe-plausible rendering: Extended (spread-out) Harvest Village, or maybe more loosely yet possibly more aptly, Bountiful Harvest Village.
My focus on this location name is purely because it's where I'll be staying overnight Friday night, at the Saejae Park Motel in Yeonpoong-myeon. Saturday morning, very early, I'll start up the mountain, Joryeong-san, and be at the top, Ihwaryeong, by the time it's starting to get light. And not long after that, I'll be meeting the older couple (I'm more and more interested in the husband now; he hasn't uttered a peep this entire time), and we'll walk down the mountain, have lunch, and go our separate ways. Maybe they'll somehow end up ascending the same side of the mountain as me, but I seriously doubt it if they're coming from the Mungyeong side. (I just checked my text archive: they are.)
By the way, one problem with the official Roman-letter rendering of Korean is the confusion that can be caused when, say, "n" and "g" are collocated, as in the city name Mungyeong. In Korean, the pronunciation is clear from the spelling: 문경, but in Roman letters, what's going on is less obvious. You should mentally divide the syllables into "moon-gyeong," but because the "ㄴ" (nieun, or letter "n") abuts the initial ㄱ (gieuk, or letter "g") in the next syllable, the nieun's sound changes to an "ng" [ ŋ ], so what you really get is "moong-gyeong." You can probably get away with saying it as "moon-gyeong," and no one will hear the difference. But if you look at Mungyeong and read it as "muhng-yuhng," rhyming with "young lung," then you're not reading the name correctly. My point is that such an error is understandable: the romanization doesn't really clarify the situation. Once you're immersed in Korean sounds, though, you can more easily figure out how to parse romanized Korean syllables. It can still be dicey, though, even for veterans. Unless you're Charles, who is beyond errors.
"Unless you're Charles, who is beyond errors."
ReplyDeleteHa! Good one, my friend.
The 문경/뭉영 issue is a real one, and it can occasionally be difficult to tell just from the romanization what the original Korean is (in this particular case, of course, 뭉 is not a syllable you will ever see, so it's pretty obvious). However, I would disagree that 문경 should be pronounced "mung-gyeong." The only time that ㄴ changes its sound is when it is paired with a liquid initial consonant (i.e., ㄹ; cf. 신라 or 설날). ㄱ is just another lax consonant and does not have any special relationship with ㄴ--otherwise 건배 would be pronounced "geonb-bae" and 간단히 would be pronounced "gand-dan-hui." What you might be hearing is people simply being a little lazy with their pronunciation (which is why everyone says 광와문 and not 광화문).
As for the translation of 延豐面, the answer is fairly simple (or as simple as anything can be in translation studies): "Yeonpung-myeon." Unless the name itself has significance in context--say, for example, the villagers themselves believe that the name of their village means they will enjoy good harvests--we generally don't translate place names, especially in technical translations. If this is a literary translation, some license may of course be taken. I once translated a work that prominently featured a village named 싸릿골 (this name was also in the title). 싸리 is a plant known in English as "bush clover," and 골 of course means "valley." So I took some poetic license and came up with Clovervale (this was well before the film "Cloverfield" came out, by the way). This as least sounds like it might be an actual village name. "Bountiful Harvest Village," while poetic, sounds a bit too... exotic? I suppose it comes down to personal preference, but if I were to translate this literarily I would try to come up with something that sounded a little more natural. In all likelihood, though, if the name of the village was not commented on in the work, I would probably go with Yeonpung-myeon.
ㄱ is just another lax consonant and does not have any special relationship with ㄴ--otherwise 건배 would be pronounced "geonb-bae" and 간단히 would be pronounced "gand-dan-hui." What you might be hearing is people simply being a little lazy with their pronunciation (which is why everyone says 광와문 and not 광화문).
ReplyDeleteMaybe I've been mishearing it all these years, but I could swear that that's exactly what I've been hearing: "gant-dan-hui." But my point was only specific to the "ng" issue. I'm sure I've heard 건강, for example, pronounced as "겅강." But from what you're saying, that's all just in my head.
I shall have to meditate on this.
This wiki confirms I'm wrong, I guess. I can't un-hear it, though: "geong-gang." Even 연풍면 itself, given the bilabial stop of the ㅍ, sounds more like "Yeompoong-myeon" to me. I may have to undo years of mishearing things.
ReplyDeleteThis feels like finding out, a few years ago, that 라면 is pronounced "lamyeon" and not "ramyeon." I've pronounced the initial consonant as a Spanish "r" since forever, and in all that time, no one ever corrected me.
So is 러시아 really "Leo-shi-ah" and not "Reo-shi-ah"? What's the phonetic rule for the initial ㄹ?
Well... I don't know if I can say that you're wrong, per se. You are right, for example, that 간단히 sounds like 간딴히. I think the issue might be one of overgeneralization: 한반도, to give a different example, doesn't sound like 한반또, and action verbs follow suit (간다, 한다, 탄다 등). Why do some combinations seem to have an extra bit of tension thrown in there? I'm sure there's a term for this phenomenon, and a linguist might be able to tell you, but I can't. (Although, I do have four Korean linguistics majors in my graduate seminar this semester. I'll ask them and see what they say. Otherwise I can pop in and ask my next-door neighbor, who is one of our linguistics profs. Actually, I happen to live with someone who studied Korean linguistics and teaches the language; I should ask her.)
ReplyDeleteAs for the transformation of ㄴ when followed by a consonant, I think this is a function of Korean pronunciation. As I tell my students, Korean consonants are not "released" unless followed by a vowel (compare, for example, the slight release of air after the AE "bat" versus the lack of such after the Korean "밭"). Because ㅍ is a bilabial sound, the lips come together after the unreleased ㄴ, possible making it sound like 염풍 (especially if the pronunciation is rushed)--but the ㄴ is still being pronounced. In actual conversation, though, this may be hard to impossible to discern.
I think the same thing can probably be said for 건강 versus 겅강 (which, as a callback to earlier, is never pronounced 건깡). There is definitely a difference, and the former is the "correct" pronunciation, but do they really sound all that different in conversation? Probably not.
As for 라면, though, I don't know who told you that it was pronounced "lamyeon," but that is not technically correct--at least not if you are thinking of it as an English "l" sound. I would say that it is indeed closer to the Spanish "r." The truth, of course, is that it is neither, and those are just approximations. But I suspect that no one ever corrected you because you were basically getting it right.
(To get slighly deeper into the weeds, modern South Korean doesn't actually have a native initial ㄹ sound. By that I mean that characters that might start with an ㄹ will generally be shifted to a ㄴ. The character for "egg" (卵), for example, is pronounced 란, but when it appears at the beginning of a word it is shifted to 난 (cf. 卵巢 = 난소); it is only when the consonant is medial that it is written (and pronounced) 란 (cf. 鷄卵 = 계란).* All the words you see beginning with ㄹ are loan words, such as 라면 or 러시아.
North Korean, on the other hand, will often use the initial ㄹ (cf. 로동, 려자 등).)
* As an entertaining experiment, ask a Korean how 환난(患難) should be pronounced. A lot of people will say "hwal-lan," but they are confusing it with 환란(患亂), which means almost the same thing but is technically a different word (the dictionary defines the former as "근심과 재난(災難)을 통틀어 이르는 말" and the latter as "근심과 재앙(災殃)을 통틀어 이르는 말," so... yeah). (The ㄴ/ㄹ thing made me think of this.)
So, how about 한국말? Is it "han-guk-mal" or "hang-gung-mal"? I'd say the latter.
ReplyDeleteThen there's the hilarious case of the subway stop 신설동, which always sounds to me like 신설똥.
I realize that, at this point, I'm talking about wildly disparate phonetic phenomena. My grand conclusion is that Korean spelling and pronunciation are as fucked as English is.