My birthday meal yesterday wasn't much to write about: just a combination of prepackaged Johnsonville(!) budae-jjigae, prepackaged sundubu-jjigae, and some sliced-up veggie tofu, which I'm really starting to enjoy, and which I'm beginning to think might function as a low-carb replacement for regular ddeok so long as I fry it good to get it firmer. I just need a good replacement for gochujang, and we're golden as long as I use BochaSweet as the "sugar." I have some ideas on that score (think: Lee Kum Kee chili oil). Maybe I'll attempt to make a keto faux ddeokbokgi* this coming weekend.
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*I realize my romanizations can be annoying to people who know the official government romanization system—tteok, tteokbokki, etc., but what good is the romanization if it doesn't help non-Koreans to pronounce Korean words? If a non-Korean newbie sees tteok, he's gonna mispronounce it. So yes, in most cases, I'm aware of the correct romanization: I simply choose not to follow it.
One bit of romanization that's hard for non-Koreans is the eo, which is not pronounced "ee-oh" but rather somewhere between "aw" and "uh," with slight variations according to context. My boss gave me an interesting mnemonic that makes eo make sense: it was originally supposed to be reminiscent of the "eo" in George. That's not a perfect way to think about the vowel, but it's a lot closer to the actual pronunciation of 어 than "ee-oh" is.
As a South African, the pronunciation of 'eo' being the same as the one in 'George' makes no sense as they're different sounds to me. Just commenting as it's always interesting how different the vowel sounds can be between the various English accents.
ReplyDeleteInteresting insight. I'm an American, and it doesn't quite work for me, either, because I tend to pronounce "George" to rhyme with "gorge" or "forge" (US mid-Atlantic suburban accent, of course)—i.e., with a long o (the \ō\ sound). I'm guessing the Korean rationale of "George" is based on a North American pronunciation, so there's some inherent linguistic bias at work here.
DeleteAre you my first-ever South African commenter? I worked with a South African colleague some years back; nice guy, talented cook. Heavy into fitness.
Ah, yes, romanization. To be honest, it's not really all that annoying to me. And I do indeed get where you're coming from.
ReplyDeleteYou asked, "What good is the romanization if it doesn't help non-Koreans to pronounce Korean words?" I think I mentioned this last time, but I don't think I went into detail because I lost track of the thread. Basically, ease of pronunciation is fairly low down on the list of priorities for RR. The first priority is to provide an accurate system for transcribing Korean. The second priority is to provide a system that is relatively easy to use (this is why it drops the diacriticals of M-R for things like "eo"). Only after this does ease of pronunciation come into play (which is why you have things like "angma" for "악마," which actually goes against the first priority).
Ultimately, no romanization system will ever be able to satisfy all three priorities to equal degrees, and pronunciation often gets short shrift--maybe because foreigners unfamiliar with Korean are going to mispronounce the words no matter what you do. But the bottom line is that the people who come up with romanization systems don't primarily value ease of pronunciation.
(Incidentally, the "George" thing doesn't make much sense to me, either, especially since George is generally romanized in Korean as 조지.)