I remember an interview some years ago in which the interviewer (some CNN guy) was talking to President Roh Tae-Woo (sp?). Anyway, several times he referred to him by name, and each time he pronounced it “President No.”
Also some years ago, someone in an interview on the radio was referring to the Rodong missile that the North Koreans have. He, likewise, pronounced it as “nodong.”
Is there anything in Korean that allows for an “r” to sometimes be pronounced as an “n?” I know that Korean has an “alphabet” instead of a character set, with specific consonants and vowel marks, so I don’t think it’s a case of something being deliberately transliterated counter-intuitively.
Well, one can’t have a cite for everything. This is going to be purely anectdotal. Both of my kids are Korean born. Like anyone else, they learn the language they grow up with, so they speak English only. ( They came as babies).
I’ve spent time in South Korea, teaching. I’ve also spent an enormous amount of time with Korean adults, at various culture events and a culture camp we take the kids to every summer. Our Tae Kwon Do Masters are also Korean born and raised.
My son’s name is Zachary. I’ve always heard the “R” pronounced clearly. Never one have I heard “Zachany”. And, my daughter’s name is Laura. Same deal.
That’s not to say that some words may have a combined R and L sound. Japanese has such a combined “L” and “R” sound, an interesting split sound.
So, I’ve never heard that switch- I don’t doubt you at all, but it’s possible it’s more of a dialectic thing than a Hangul Korean Language thing
As part of my MS(military specialty) I learned some Korean while serving in the US Army. Part of the problem with pronunciation is the there is no exact “r” sound in Korean. There is a sound that is hard to learn for us English speakers that is somewhere in between “r” and “l”. So when spelling Korean names in English you have several options. It can be Lee, Li, Rhee, etc. I don’t remember the n being an alternate though.
As an additional note, Korean does not emply our English “f” sound either. I once saw a bottle of Fanta Cola over there that had English on one side and Korean hangul on the other. The Korean name was spelled with a sound that is like a “b”, so it would have been like Banta Cola. But Korean letters are not hard to learn. They only have a couple more than we do and the alphabet is phonetic, one sound to one letter. That sure beats English.
There are certain cases where a r-sound and a n-sound may be interchanged. One example is the name of my apartment building- it’s spelled “jung-rim” but generally pronounced “jung-nim”. I expect that this could be one of those odd consonant-consonant interactions that occur in Korean, and it might only apply to speakers of the Kangwon-do accent.
Incidentally, the way Fanta is spelled now, it would be romanized as “Hwanta”.
I’m a Japanese speaker, not a Korean speaker. However, I have heard Korean spoken and the general sound and rhythm of it is close enough to Japanese to make me listen twice. And if the Korean sound that lies somewhere between an r and an l is anything like the corresponding Japanese sound, I could see how in some cases it could come out sounding ALMOST like an “n,” the same way the t in “Tao” sounds ALMOST like a d.
When making this l/r hybrid, the tongue starts out very close to the spot where n is made, and if you speak with your mouth closed (as many Japanese speakers do…I am generalizing) and don’t give your tongue enough space to get away after initial contact, it would end up sounding like a weird muffled “n.”
Does this post make any sense at all? Is anyone even still reading this thread?
In Korean there is a single phoneme which can come out either /l/ or /r/. At the beginning of a syllable it’s /l/, and after a vowel it’s /r/.
The two sounds /l/ and /n/ are articulated with the tongue pretty much in the same position. If (while humming the vocal cords) you direct the stream of breath orally around the edges of the tongue, it produces /l/. If you send the breath through the nasal cavity, it produces /n/. Try it and see.
But in Korean /n/ already has its own phoneme, its own letter, separate from /l/. How this nasalization comes about, I wish someone would explain. Where’s Astroboy14 when you need him?
Actually, the ‘t’ in “Tao” sounds much more like a d than a t. In modern pinyin it is spelled with a d. The ‘t’ was under the older system that gave us Peking for Beijing. The older uses are slowly dying out, but persist in weird little pockets, like Peking Duck and Taoism.
Are you saying it should actually be “Peking Tuck?” (just a [very bad] joke)
I have very limited experience with Chinese, but from what I have heard from friends who study it (“heard,” as in “heard them speaking chinese”), the sound produced at the beginning of “Tao” is somewhere between a d and a t, which is one of the reasons the two transliteration systems disagree: the truth is that you CAN’T precisely duplicate many Chinese consonant sounds with the Roman alphabet. The sound ought to be something like an aspirated “d,” where the sound is d, but the feeling when you make it is t.
Sorry to nitpick, but…well, actually I have no excuse. But I am sincerely sorry to nitpick.
Are you saying it should actually be “Peking Tuck?” (just a [very bad] joke)
I have very limited experience with Chinese, but from what I have heard from friends who study it (“heard,” as in “heard them speaking chinese”), the sound produced at the beginning of “Tao” is somewhere between a d and a t, which is one of the reasons the two transliteration systems disagree: the truth is that you CAN’T precisely duplicate many Chinese consonant sounds with the Roman alphabet. The sound ought to be something like an aspirated “d,” where the sound is d, but the feeling when you make it is t.
Although I guess continuing this hijack will probably just make matters deteriorate in to a “it’s f sharp!” “no, it’s g flat!” kind of thing.
Sorry to nitpick, but…well, actually I have no excuse. But I am sincerely sorry to nitpick.
Yo! Right here! (been busy the last few days, and heven’t had much time for SDMB…)
Korean does have a distinct /n/, but no distinct/r/ sound… the /l/ can, on occasion, sound similar to an /r/, depending on it’s placement in a syllabic unit (it’s complicated…).
As to the /n/ sounding like an /r/… does happen (in fact, my fiancee’s family name is spelled, in Korean, as “Noh”… but on her passport, in English, it’s “Roh”).
Why? Despite 5 years of on and off study of Korean, I dunno! Someone once told me that it has something to do with the derivation of the particular syllable in question from the pronunciation of the original Chinese character. I have no idea if that’s true or not, but it sounds confusing enough to quell any desire I have to learn Chinese in an attempt to prove/disprove it…
I know that my fiancee prefers the “Roh” spelling because in Korean society, when someone calls her “Miss Noh”, it sounds like they are saying “Not a miss!” (IE: she’s NO lady! Konglish… :rolleyes: )
Sorry if my last post was a bit confusing… I wrote it quickly as I was leaving the house a bit late (when am I gonna learn that I can’t just pop onto the SDMB “for a second”… never seems to work! )
OK, after further research, IE: asking my business partner (fluent in conversational Korean, but can’t write it…) & calling my fiancee (Native Korean, so she speaks, reads and writes fluently… but isn’t all that hot at explainin’ it in English! ) two main theories have come up:
The pronunciation of /l/, /n/ and /r/ are all very similar, and the name of the /l/ letter in Korean is “lryung”… so the choice of how to pronounce or spell (in English) a syllable that begins or ends with a /n/ or /l/ is more or less up to the person speaking/writing…
Many syllables are derived from Chinese characters, and DO, in fact, have an /r/ sound when pronounced in Chinese, so they tend to get spelled/pronounced that way when translated into English…
For the record, the number of letters in the Korean alphabet also depends on who you ask… [sup]Why is nothing ever easy in my life??[/sup] This confusion stems from the fact that some letters in the alphabet are a combination of two letters. For example, the /s/ letter is called “shi-ut” (no kidding! And no bad jokes, please…), the symbol for shi-ut, if written once, is an /s/ sound… if it’s written twice without a vowel in between, it’s a new letter called “ssang-shi-ut”, and is pronounced like an /s/ if you’re really drunk and trying to explain to Mom that you were at the Church Youth Group, and not out drinking with those lay-abouts from your part-time job at Arby’s (IE: “sss”). Ever wonder why the Ssangyong company is spelled that way? Now ya know… there are several letters in Korean that can be doubled-up this way and get a different pronunciation.
Thanks, Astroboy14 . . . so it’s a question of one of those antique “Chinese character readings”? I have seen books published in South Korea where they still use the odd Chinese character here & there among the Han’gul. Pray tell, what is the exact Chinese character that the Korean name Noh/Roh is based on? Maybe if we check it in a Chinese dictionary that could help elucidate this tough question?
BTW I know what you mean about the native Korean speaker unable to articulate exactly what makes something in their language the way it is. My wife is from India and likewise can’t explain grammatical fine points of her native language, just has an intuitive feel for it. Unless the native speaker has made a deliberate study of linguistics, they won’t be able to analyze it the way a foreigner would like.
uh … actually, it’s the other way around. The Pinyin “d” is really an unaspirated /t/. The Pinyin “t”, by contrast, is a heavily aspirated /t[sup]h[/sup]/. In a sense, Wade-Giles had it right in the first place.
In Chinese stop and affricate phonemes, the contrast is between aspirated unvoiced and unaspirated unvoiced. If you slip an unvoiced stop into your speech, like actual b, d, g, the Chinese hearer will hear it as unaspirated p, t, k. That’s why Pinyin was able to use b, d, g.
English stop phonemes are just the reverse. We contrast voiced vs. unvoiced and we don’t notice if something’s aspirated or not. The aspirated /t[sup]h[/sup]/ in top and the unaspirated /t/ in stop sound the same to us, although they’re two different phonemes in Chinese and Hindi.
Now, what a Chinese hearer would make of the voiced aspirates of Sanskrit and Hindi (bh, ch, dh, gh, jh), I don’t know. That might be really confusing. Indic languages use a four-way contrast: all possible combinations of voicing and unvoicing. The Chinese distinguish /t[sup]h[/sup]/ from /t/. English speakers distinguish /t/ from /d/. But in India you have to tell the difference between /t/, /t[sup]h[/sup]/, /d/, and /d[sup]h[/sup]/.
No prob… but I’m afraid I haven’t really solved the question entirely…
I just called Miss Noh/Roh (and yes, before anyone asks, when we first started dating, I was a bit concerned about going out with a girl named “Miss NO”…but she was too cute to abandon because of linguistics ), and queried as to the Chinese character for her family name. She’s not 100% sure, but she thinks it’s from the Chinese word for ‘nation’.
So I looked up the word ‘nation’ in an online Chinese-English dictionary, which took me to this page with 11 different meanings in Chinese… AND sound buttons for pronunciation! Ah HA!, I thought, NOW we’re getting somewhere! Unfortunately, I can’t seem to get the sound buttons to work on this computer here in my office (and can’t screw around with it because it has Win98 * IN KOREAN*[sup]AAARRRGGGHHHHH!!![/sup]). So I’m stuck there for the moment, as I can’t read Chinese (it’s all Greek to me! [sup]HA! I slay me![/sup])… I’ll try on my own computer when I get home later (and where I can play around with the ENGLISH Win98 settings).[sup]I’m just having a good ol’ time with the superscripting today![/sup]
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