It’s spelled ‘Roh’ everywhere I see it, but pronounced ‘No’ when said out loud. What’s the deal?
Just a problem of translation. There is an official system of translating Korean sound into Romanized words.
Some of Roh’s in the States choose to spell their names as: Ro, Noh, No.
Park’s are spelled as Pak
Lee’s are spelled as Yee or Rhee.
The Kim’s are always Kims
singing
You must remember this,
A Kim is still a Kim…
But at least Pak/Park makes sense…The vowel sound is caught half way between an ‘ah’ and an ‘ar’. I don’t think there is any jumbling the ‘n’ sound for the ‘r’ sound…It doesn’t make any sense.
From a physiological standpoint, there is not that much difference between making an /r/ sound and an /n/ sound. They are both produced with the tongue near or touching the ridge in the roof of the mouth just behind the front teeth.
The /l/ sound is produced in that same area, too: hence the stereotypical /r/ for /l/ swapping of Asians speaking English.
An earlier thread, which contains a link to yet another earlier related thread:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=151663
Monty in that has the basic idea in the other thread. I’m not quite sure what Dr. A. Nemo’s problem is.
First you should keep in mind that in the far east, family names come before the given names.
What’s happening here is when the r/l consonant is at the beginning of a word or a name, it’s changed to something else. In Roh’s case, the r/l consonant became an “n”. In the case of Lees, the r/l is eliminated completely, so you get some people with their names written as Yi, because that’s the way it’s pronounced and Ee simply looks funny. So as previously mentioned, if the person in question is Korean, Yi = Lee = Li = Rhee.
Thanks, non-native! Different languages have different phonemic setups. One language may not make a distinction between aspiration on the voiceless stops (but require it) at the beginning of a syllable (<=describing English) and another language may consider aspiration or lack thereof to change the meaning of the word (<=describing Vietnamese). An example of the foregoing is:
With aspiration: [t[sup]h[/sup]oi]
Without aspiration: [toi]
In English, the first one is the child’s plaything (unless it’s really expensive, then it’s a man’s plaything). In Vietnamese, the first one means: “only.” The second one is perceived by the English speaker as being the first one if the speaker keys on the lack of voicing on the initial consonant or as being [doi] if the speaker keys on the lack of aspiration instead. In Vietnamese, the second one is the first person singular pronoun. This is an example of a minimal pair.
In Korean, the [l] and [r] sounds are in what’s called complementary distribution because only one of them appears in particular environments. The Korean speaker perceives both sounds to be the same sound, just like the English speaker referred to above perceives the [t] in my example to be the same sound as the [t] at the end of a word, such as in [bot].
And since Korean uses a non-latinate alphabet for its writing, that’s another level of removal in transliterating its sounds into English form.
For the record, I have no new information on this topic (see the other linked threads). But I just thought of something: regarding the N. Korean “Ro-Dong” missiles… the name is spelled “No-Dong” in Korean, but I bet there is someone in the N.K gub’mint who speaks English well enough to know we’d make fun of that name! 
All Korean last names stem from Chinese characters. When a name is written out in Hangul, it’s really an attempt to phonetically transcribe the original Chinese character. It just so happens that “Roh” and “Noh” are two ways to pronounce one name. Or so says Mr. Karomon.