My glory, what a remarkable reply! Thank you, indeed.

2003-03-03 14:53:32, Thomas Chan <tc31@...> wrote:

>It's U+D604 U+B300, "hyeondae" in one transliteration system that seems

[...]

>See the hangul at:
>http://www.hyundai-motor.com/main.html , e.g., under the "News" section.

In case those news entries change, try the blue text ending with latin
capitals "...GREEN SERVICE". The first two glyphs are there, too.
(No, I don't know Korean, but I did look up the two Unicode hangul. I'm
getting the sneaky feeling :) that Korean hangul is probably rather easy to
learn, being less arbitrary than katakana, although that's surely not a value
judgment, either way!

[...]

>at least for the vowel. I'm not sure what sound you are transcribing with
>"shoon-deh" or "moon-deck"--[u] or the rotated "c"?

I apologize for not knowing the IPA.

Btw, I think there is a scheme for encoding the IPA by using only Latin-1, and
probably only ASCII (7-bit)at that.

>The particular semi-vowel after [h] seems to be difficult to eke out of
>English speakers, cf., the Japanese-named comet Hyakutake, so there might
>be a concession there.

I distinctly recall trying to say it properly, but did not want to strain the
good professor's patience. Quite possible that I wasn't getting it right, and
that might be where I went wrong. I'm not too bad a mimic, though.

When I was much younger, my Russian father tried to teach me the difference
between two consonants, one (iirc) with a low-pitched formant peak in its
random noise (fricative?), the other with a high pitch. It was something like
the difference between English "sheet" and "shoot", minus the final "t".
They might have been (as capitals) SHA and SHCHA, U+0428 and U+0429.

>But I don't know where your informant gets "sh" (of "shoon") from, although I
>note the analogue of this word in Mandarin Chinese, 'modern', would be is

xian4dai4 (Wade-Giles "hsien4-tai4").

I might not have heard him with a linguist's ears!

[...]

In any event, I really appreciate all the effort you went to, and will remain
somewhat uncertain about how to say it. Just possibly, I'll come across a
group of Koreans leaving a Christian church service, and use my very best
manners when I ask. Unfortunately, I don't know any Koreans personally.

Nicholas Bodley |@| Waltham, Mass.
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