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From: deb5@kimbark.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Pronunciation of Roh Tae-woo [was Re: Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese..
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References: <Dn97rx.8Gt@news.hawaii.edu> <4h4sd5$n1c@keknews.kek.jp> <Dnvzz9.3tq@midway.uchicago.edu> <4hn23m$rmb@clarknet.clark.net>
Date: Sat, 9 Mar 1996 04:56:49 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu sci.lang:51307 sci.lang.japan:32973

In article <4hn23m$rmb@clarknet.clark.net>,
Harlan Messinger <gusty@clark.net> wrote:
>Daniel von Brighoff (deb5@kimbark.uchicago.edu) wrote:
>: 	They are ubiquitous in newspapers, especially in headlines,
>: and are still heavily used in some fields, notablly history.  It is
>: also not strictly true that each character has only one reading; as 
>: is the case with Hanzi, many have two readings and a tiny fraction
>: have more.  Also, morphophonological processes can produce striking
>: contrasts between the readings of compounds and those of characters
>: in isolation.  For example, <tok> and <lip> together become tongnip 
>: "independence", but <lip> and <lon> yield imnon "argument".  (Similar
>: processes operate in Japanese, but with less regularity.)
>
>As long as you're on (or near) the subject: do you know why South Korean 
>President's name Roh is, as the press informs us, pronounced /no/?

	It is only in relatively recent times that initial [l] and [r]
have gained phonemic (or quasi-phonemic) standing in Seoul Korean.  
Ch'ae Man-shik has his protagonist pronounce the English (by way of 
Japanese) loanword lunch as "nanch'i" in his 1938 novel _Ch'eonha T'ae-
p'yeong_ ("Peace under Heaven"), but modern Seoulites generally have 
little problem with "radio" and "lemon".

	In native Korean words, /l/ does not appear initially.  Inter-
vocalically, it is [r] and, when final or before another consonant,
[l].  This applies as well to Chinese loans, which have become fully 
naturalised in Korean.  The Chinese source for Roh's surname is "Lu",
written with initial <l> in earlier Korean but pronounced (and now
spelled--in the South at least) with [n].  Before [i] and [j], the
/l/ is simply dropped, which is how Chinese Li becomes Korean Yi
(also Romanised as Rhee, Lee, Li, etc. depending on the bearer's know-
ledge of earlier spelling conventions, the Chinese pronunciation, and
so on).











-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
