So far as I know, in Korean names transliterated to the Latin alphabet, the J generally indicates a sound somewhat similar to what it generally represents in English, like in “judge.” (Really English /dʒ/ and Korean /dz/ … slightly different but close enough)
However, a while ago I noticed that John Oliver pronounces names like “Kim Jong-un” and “Kim Jong-il” as if they were spelled like “Kim Yong-un” and “Kim Yong-il,” that is as if the J was pronounced as in German.
(I have also heard Oliver refer to the German and Spanish pronunciations of the letter J, respectively [j] and [h]/, as “silent J,” which I found confusing.)
And then recently I was watching some clips from English panel game shows like QI and Would I Lie to You? and I noticed that same Y pronunciation.
So far as I know the [dz] (J) and [j] (Y) are separate phonemes in Korean. They’re not interchangeable. In fact, Kim Jong-il had a prominent relative named Kim Yong-il. Those are two different names in Korean, right?
So, is this “yong” pronunciation common in England or other places? What’s going on with that?
Somebody else might give you the technical universal pronunciation symbol thingies, but basically the first Korean letter in 정 (Jong by NK transliteration, Jeong by ROK transliteration), as in 정일 (Jong Il/Jeong-il) or 정은 (Jong Un/Jeong-eun) is a non aspirated ‘ch’, as opposed to the letter ㅊ which is an aspirated ‘ch’. The original McCune–Reischauer system in use as of the Korean War used ch for starting ㅈ sounds, and ch’ for starting ㅊ. The current NK system is a variant on it, using for j for starting ㅈ sounds among other changes. The ROK system since 2000 is fairly different but also uses j for phonemes starting with ㅈ.
There’s no basis on which to pronounce it anything like a ‘y’ unless you just never bothered to ask somebody who actually knew how to pronounce it, or aren’t interested.
I’ve noticed over many years though this is more common or natural in British English, putting made up sounds on letters/phonemes in foreign transliterations assuming the fundamental reality of the word is the Latin letter transliteration as opposed to how the word is actually pronounced. For example, Hyundai Motor (or their ad agencies) mispronounce the name of the company two different ways, on purpose, in US v UK. The correct pronunciation is ‘hyun-dae’, there’s definitely a consonant ‘y’ there. In the US they pronounce it ‘hun-dae’ (which would be a different spelling in Korean than the correct one) for simplicity, ‘hundae, it rhymes with Sunday’. But in Britain they assume Brits will attach their own more Anglicized pronunciation, ‘high-oon-die’, it’s swimming upstream to try to correct them (‘well you did spell it that way, mate’) and just go with that.
It’s one thing if the British pronunciation were Anglicizing “Jong” based on English orthography. Instead, the pronunciation I’m pointing out reads the letters in violation of English orthography. That’s odd.
Hypothetically, all these TV people have heard of Carl Jung, right? So throwing some new Jung/Jong/Jeongs into the mix might initially lead to confusion… (though you would expect them to study such things to make sure they have it right before appearing on the air)
It’s not so much English language orthography but the idea that the Latin letter rendering is the fundamental reality of the word. Therefore, the pronunciation of the word could be the same as other words which are ‘the same’ in that sense, like the German name Jung (OK that’s Jung but in fact some people with the Korean family name 정 spell it Jung in Latin letters).
This happens back and forth between different writing systems a lot but there’s an added interesting dimension of what Sino-Korean words or phonemes really ‘are’. I’d tend to think of the Jong in Jong Il as ‘really’ 正, the underlying Chinese character so not the same as the family name which is (usually) 鄭 though both are spelled 정 in hangul. ‘Korean centric’ younger native speakers might tend to think of both phonemes being the same, 정. My point is just that IME and YMMV, Brits are more inclined to think of transliterated words as being ‘really’ the transliteration, thereby adopted into English, so why not pronounce them any way which is plausible for the those particular Latin letters? But not that that’s a strictly British thing among English speakers. And it’s also true of all kinds of other language speakers, including Koreans when it comes to hangul approximations of English words and names.
When have the British
I) Ever spelt anything the way it’s pronounced? Norrich anyone? Or Coeburn?
II) Pronounced foreign names the proper way? Baarsalona.
Barsalona is actually pretty close to the Catalan pronunciation.
And assuming that the transliteration can be read as being a word in your native language is the whole point of transliterations; it’s also the reason we can have multiple transliterations into the same alphabet family*, that different languages use similar alphabets to represent different phonemic catalogs and even when two languages share a phoneme they may represent it differently (cf. all the ways /ɲ/ is represented: ñ in Spanish, gn in French, ny in Catalan, ñ or gn or ne in Euskera…).
The Spanish alphabet, the Latin alphabet, the English alphabet, the French alphabet, the Danish alphabet… are all different, even if most of the symbols happen to be the same.
Some interesting extra info: the reason we transliterate the unaspirated “ch” sound as “J” is that all voiced consonants in English are unaspirated. In fact, some argue that the aspiration is the main difference between unvoiced and voiced consonants, as it’s not uncommon to devoice consonants in English.
This is also why it is easy for us to tell the difference between words when we whisper. Despite everything being unvoiced, we still don’t aspirate the “voiced” consonants.
Hence, when we need to transliterate an unvoiced, unaspirated consonant, we often use the voiced variant. Using the unvoiced version, with its aspiration, sounds more wrong. “Dow” sounds closer than “tow” for Tao. And Jong sounds closer than Chong.
That might work for a language that has a reasonably regular orthographic system, like German, Italian, or Spanish. It doesn’t really work for English.
And it especially doesn’t work for transliterations creates for non-English speakers like Pinyin, which has an almost negligent relationship to English orthography for it to be used by English language publications.
You’d think transliterations could be a little more regular, since they don’t have traditional and no-longer-accurate spellings, and they’re not borrowed words being spelt according to some other language’s orthographic system. Like, why does Nissan have a double ‘s’ when a double consonant usually indicates the preceding vowel is short in English?
Because 1) the consonant is doubled in Japanese, and 2) as in the case of Korean and Chinese, you are dealing with a Japanese system of Romanization that only coincidentally has anything to do with English. You may as well ask why “Hmoob” has a “silent b”.
(1) the transliteration wasn’t done by a monoglot Anglophone who was trying to do nothing but find the spelling that in es eyes most closely matched what E was hearing.
(2) Even had that been the case, es transliteration might work for em but who knows how many other monoglot Anglophones would agree? On this board whenever the subject of pronunciation comes up, almost immediately English speakers with differing accents and dialects start bewildering each other with their disagreeing concepts of English pronunciation.
(3) There aren’t any universally agreed upon transliteration schemes. Different people do what they want. Linguists use systems that work for their purposes. And people transliterating their own language use systems that work for people who already know the language. In this case, just guessing, “Nissan” was most likely transliterated by a native Japanese speaker.
(4) As Anglophones do we really want transliterations like “Kneesahn”? “Rawdayvoo”? India has spent 60 years ashcanning transliterations like “Cawnpore” and “Oude” in favor of spellings like “Kanpur” and “Awadh,” which are slightly more rigorous if slightly less transparent to monoglot Anglophones.
Yes, transliteration systems often use doubled consonants to indicate, guess what, a doubled consonant (gemination) rather than to follow the strange and arbitrary (and inconsistent) English tendency to indicate something happening somewhere else.
And of course the overwhelming fact that, going back to 1066 at least, English has one of the least internally consistent orthographic systems of any major language. Why go through the impossible effort of trying to find a regular relationship with a highly irregular orthography?