i18n@... wrote:

>
> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
> >
> > > Same here - I haven't kept up, but I have often thought it would be a
> > > mighty good bar bet to claim that I could teach someone how to read
> > > elementary Korean characters in the space of a long day.
> >
> > But not to pronounce Korean.
>
> Yeah there are some sounds that are difficult for native English
> speakers to create, let alone hear.

It has nothing to do with the ease or difficulty of pronouncing sounds.
It has to do with knowing which sounds are pronounced in which words,
and those sounds are NOT simply read off the letters that are written.

> > "The usual romanization" is a 1-to-1 transliteration. If it's "full of
> > holes," then so is Korean orthography. If you call English spelling
> > "full of holes," then so is Korean -- it's MORPHOPHONEMIC.
>
> 1-1? I think there are sounds in Korean that don't exist in English. So,
> the English spellings are approximations. Japanese has similar issues

The spellings are not "English." They happen to use most of the same
letters that are used for English. That doesn't mean the sounds sound
like English ones, or French ones, or German ones, or Swahili ones, or
Konkani ones.

> with the kana row labeled "ra-ri-ru...". the sound is not the same as we
> use that letter for. Ina addition, in Japanese, there are various
> semi-standard romanizations floating around, and there may be the same
> for Korean. That is what I was referring to - if there was a one-one
> correspondence, there would not be competing romanizations.

Why not???? At the very least, you know perfectly well that you can
transliterate one particular letter as either l or r.

EVERY transliteration IS a one-to-one correspondence of the symbols in
one script with symbols in another script -- that's what transliteration
means.

For Chinese, there are Wade-Giles and pinyin, and a number of others.
They are _all_ one-to-one correspondences between sound and letter, and
they're all different.

> But I am not yet sure what Andrew was referring too...unlike some people
> here, I try to express my (mis-)understanding of someone's point rather
> then simply write a simple sentence asking "What did you mean"? I find
> it generally gets quicker results. YMMV.

--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...