Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Instantnood (talk | contribs) at 08:39, 17 November 2005 (→hanja in placenames). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Template:Korean requires |hangul= parameter. Because of their length, the previous discussions on this page have been archived. If further archiving is needed, see Misplaced Pages:How to archive a talk page.

Previous discussions:

• Archive 1 (to September 1 2004):
• Archive 2 (to July 2005):

Hyphen use

Forgive me that I am so picky and bored as to read through the M-R and RR guidelines, but in both schemes, such names as Hallasan and Kŭmgangsan really shouldn't have hyphens in them... Should those be changed to match guidelines too? Please do respond if you have any comment, because I am quite worried to change the above si/shi combinations already with no support/opposition, and I am not an expert! (I think I will leave alone mixing the use of ʻ (aspirated consonants) and ʼ (separating syllables that may be confused), because that may really be going too far...)

I promise when my summer holidays here in Sydney ends in a few days, I won't have time to be so picky... until July :-) -- KittySaturn 05:43, 2005 Mar 1 (UTC)

I'm pro-hyphen. Hyphens disambiguate syllable boundaries, and provide valuable information to non-speakers of Korean. Of course, in the case of Hallasan and Geumgangsan, there isn't much to disambiguate. But even there, hyphens do clarify the internal structure of the name somewhat. Visviva 16:57, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Whatever. Important is to have redirects for the other versions. Kokiri 28 June 2005 23:22 (UTC)

Just a note that the North Korean government use Mt. X on Naenara, whilst the South Korean tourist board use Mt. Xsan (no hyphens). Well, I've engaged Google:

Name     Xsan   X-san   Mt X   Mt Xsan   Mt X-san
Halla    6080   4390    4270   736       76
Jiri     6500   648     1170   395       7
Chiri    522    436     556    151       7
Sorak    4020   828     4530   389       9
Seorak   9060   1040    1820   4900      1   
Kumgang  840    750     8920   75        251
Geumgang 752    259     4130   317       102   
Baekdu   8110   102     626    281       8
Baektu   29     3       16     5         0
Paektu   691    3420    5700   85        4
Myohyang 459    223     511    17        3
Kuwol    839    590     518    4         0

Kokiri 2 July 2005 18:05 (UTC)

Continuing with M-R standardisation.

At the risk of arousing disagreements, I have decided to continue standardising the McCune-Reischauer trasliterations on Korean articles. Basically, I am enforcing the following rules:

1. ㅅ is "s" in initial position except 쉬, which is transcribed shwi;
2. Aspirated consonants due to adjacent consonants are not transcribed. Example, Chikhalsi, not Chik'alshi;
3. Pronunciation takes precedence over M-R spelling rules (i.e. that table of rules). Example: Hancha, not Hanja, even though looking up the table would tell you Hanja;
4. However, -북도 designations are an exception to the above, transcribed -pukto instead of -bukto, even though that is how it is pronounced;
5. Hyphen use: use hyphen to separate name from administrative divisions only, not to geographical features such as Kŭmgangsan. (This also applies to Revised Romanisation.) With names ending in 남도 or 북도, the hyphen is put before 남/북, not before 도 (as is the case with Revised Romanisation);
6. Where an M-R transliteration specifically refers to old South Korean transcriptions, I have not touched them, for example when mentioning a South Korean city that used to be called Chik'alshi;
7. Apostrophe is used in M-R for separating syllables where in RR the hyphen is used. -ng+vowel combination means ㅇ+ vowel; -n'g+vowel means ㄴㄱ+vowel.

The above are clearly stated in both McCune and Reischauer's original paper (1939) and the recent Library of Congress guidelines. The Library of Congress guidelines also mention using ’ for separating ambiguous syllables and ‘ for aspirated consonants; however I have not seen this rule in the original M-R paper and I am leaving this alone. -- KittySaturn 22:07, 2005 Mar 5 (UTC)

Republic of Korea vs. slang/inaccurate South Korea

Clearly the Misplaced Pages articles have to start using the accepted name of the Republic of Korea and the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea rather than the slang Americanisms "South Korea" and "North Korea" which are in common usage, but are not the real names of either of these countries.

Any almanac, fact book, encyclopaedia, or atlas has no citation whatsoever of the nation of Republic of Korea appearing as South Korea other than as a short form, and while we all know what we are talking about, it makes sense to make the Misplaced Pages more accurate as soon as we can.

Entries often include USA, US, America, United States, or even the US of A - but technically it is "United States of America". And we should give the same respect to both the Koreas. The Koreans also call their country by other names, which can be used within the next wikipedia if it moves into the Korean language.

Could we start tidying up the entries throughout the Misplaced Pages to reflect the real country names - otherwise we will start setting a bad precedent, and lead to massive mislabelling of other countries according to slang or unconventional names.

Can we get some sort of agreement to correct this before the Misplaced Pages gets larger and more inaccurate?

For those of you who intend to argue: look at the entry here:

United States Embassy, Seoul, Republic of Korea. http://seoul.usembassy.gov/

We do not see the country called "South Korea" on the official website, or on the ambassador's credentials at the UN.

Are you trying to say we should write the United States of America every time we talk about the US as a matter of respect? I doubt that any American would feel that the name US lacks respect so much as that they would prefer others always call them by the United States of America.

Additionally, that very official web site you mentioned actually has lots and lots of places where it calls the ROK "South Korea". See for example . (There are over a hundred pages with "South Korea" in it.) I would not call "South Korea" an Americanism. Even in the UK or in Australia, it is "South Korea", in Hong Kong it is 南韓, even on the Korean peninsula there are such names as 남한 (south Han) (in the south) and 남조선 (south Joseon/Chosŏn)) (in the north). When the context is clear, it is called Korea, 韓國, 한국. It is just an accepted short form; it is not "inaccurate". Even the Encarta mentions the ROK name one single time (under the article titled "Korea, South") and proceeds to use "South Korea" in the rest of the article. In any case, the names in Misplaced Pages in general are mentioned by what people commonly call it, not official names. We aren't about to write "Commonwealth of Australia" every time we talk about Australia or "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" every time we talk about the UK. South Korea is a short name for Republic of Korea, so we will use it. -- KittySaturn 00:24, 2005 Mar 22 (UTC)

Well, South Korea (etc.) is in accordance to the Manual of Style (use most common form). Nothing else to say. Kokiri 28 June 2005 23:23 (UTC)

Chosŏn'gŭl and Hangul

I am proposing that "Hangul" be replaced with "Chosongul" in all name tables relating to North Korean subjects. Would this be feasible? --68.194.108.16 02:23, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Thanks to the template system, that would be quite easy to do, at least for most North Koreans. I'm not entirely sure it's a good idea, but I can't think of any good arguments against it right now. I will post a link to this proposal on the Misplaced Pages:Korea-related topics notice board. -- Visviva 02:54, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Sounds like a reasonable suggestion, but really should be Chosŏn'gŭl ;) Kokiri 28 June 2005 23:09 (UTC)

Done. See Template:Koreanname north and Template:Koreanname north image. -- Visviva 13:19, 17 July 2005 (UTC)

Hi. I apologize in advance for my completely ingnorant intrusion on a discussion between people who are clearly expert. I simply cannot find an answer to my question anywhere else.

I am exploring the history of the Korean alphabet for a paper I am writing on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee , and I want to know the literal definition of Chosŏn'gŭl. I can see that it must mean something like "Korean script" simply by looking at the spelling, but I was wondering if the word carried any other meaning or connotation, like Hangul. (It is my understanding (a la wikipedia, and likely your work) that Hangul means "Great script" in archaic Korean and "Korean script" in the modern.)

Also, when did North Korea begin using the name Chosŏn'gŭl? Also, are there any other names by which the alphabet is called, for instance casual or affectionate names?

Thank you. And again, sorry for butting in.

Afaik, NK never started using Chosŏn'gŭl, that was the name of the language before (some old people still use it in the south). Cf. Joseon (Chosŏn). Kokiri 09:13, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

Alphabetizing South Korean Wikipedians

Would it be a good idea to re-order the (few at this point) S.K. Wiks? I know there are always difficulties with alphabetizing Korean and Western names, but maybe it might be of use when the list gets bigger. By the way, at the top of the South Korean Wikipedians page, there is a note to also add to the gen. Wik'n page - but when I link thither, the only place I see to list is the SKW page that I just came from. 211.225.34.177 01:27, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

McCune-Reischauer: Yi or I?

User:Mr Tan's adjustment of the name table for Sunjong of Korea leads me to bring this matter here. The question is: in the name table, should the MR for 이 (family name) be rendered as Yi or I? Mccune-reischauer.org suggests I, and I can't find anything to contradict that. For that reason, I had been changing Yi to I whenever I ran across it.

Yi for 이 is common usage, but then again so is "Woo" for 우 and the aforementioned "Shi" for 시, neither of which belong in a name table. Can anyone find a reason to prefer Yi?

In any case, this shouldn't affect the way we spell names in articles, since Yi is the spelling preferred by most 이s who are not Lees. -- Visviva 12:30, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

As you know, there are three main files on the MR site that guide our transliterations. The 1939 file seems to allow it, while explicitly prohibiting Ri and Li (p. 52):

"Another very important example is 李, the surname of the kings of the last Korean dynasty and still a very common Korean surname. Actually it is pronounced in the standard dialect and should be Romanized I, but some may prefer to retain the older Romanization, Yi, because that is already the familiar form. In any case the other Romanizations of 李, Ri and Li, should not be used."

The 1961 seems to say nothing about it; and the Library of Congress guidelines use Yi (page 100):

The surname 李 is always romanized Yi, no matter how it is written (李, 이, 리).

(However I personally usually do not follow the last file; for example it prefers putting spaces even before particles, which the original 1939 formulation doesn't.) I think Yi is one of the exceptions that has stuck. And we wouldn't write the "this" 이 as yi. But in my opinion I think the surname Yi is allowable. On the other hand, 시 has never been shi in any of these three files, so there isn't much reason any more to write it as shi since South Korea developed their RR. -- KittySaturn 04:54, 2005 Jun 16 (UTC)

Disputed names

This discussion has been moved to Misplaced Pages talk:Naming conventions (Korean)/Disputed names. -- Visviva 03:27, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Historical Periods: Colonialization

The article for the period between about 1900 and 1950 was changed into History of Korea (1900-1950), since (afaik) colonialization was not NPOV enough. Should we update the convention here accordingly? Kokiri 28 June 2005 23:13 (UTC)

Can we have an open discussion about this section? Most of the convention came into existence by observing how we Wikipedians do things. Some of the issues have been discussed at some length, but there are three sections that have just stood here unchallenged. I hope we can discuss these sections in the light that Misplaced Pages:Naming convention is now official Pedia policy. Kokiri 16:25, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

Historical divisions as used by

• Korean Cultural Insights by the KNTO: Old Joseon (Bronze Age) - Buyeo (Iron Age) - Samhan - Three Kingdoms (Silla, Goguryeo, Baekje; Gaya) - Unified Silla - Goryeo Dynasty - Joseon Dynasty - Daehan Empire (proclaimed; overlap with Joseon) - Japanese colonial rule - SK/NK
• {{History of Korea template: Gojoseon - Samhan - Three Kingdoms (Goguryeo, Baekje, Silla) - Unified Silla and Balhae - Later Three Kingdoms - Goryeo - Joseon - 1900-1950 - Divided Korea

The change to 1900-1950 is a problematic one, particularly since it obviously overlaps with the Korean Empire and Divided Korea periods. I'd like to see us discuss that further. The move was well-intentioned, but the Talk page suggests that those who did it didn't really know what they were getting into. -- Visviva 23:39, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

Names of monarchs

This is another section that was never really discussed, afaik. I believe it is modelled after articles on monarchs elsewhere in the world? Kokiri 16:25, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

Yes. See Misplaced Pages:Naming conventions (monarchs). Originally the two were in disagreement, with this page calling for (title) (name) of (kingdom), but this was changed a while back to be in compliance with the general standard. This change was proposed, although not really discussed, on this page -- see the first archive. -- Visviva 23:26, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

Korean article template

Another such section. Do we really need the standard link See also List of Korea-related topics, now that we have categories? Kokiri 16:25, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

I like it, and would like to keep it, although I guess we don't really need it. AFAICT, we had categories when the template was created, hence the Category:Korea link, but I wouldn't really know about that.  ;-) Basically the link is just a reciprocal one; since all KRT's should be linked from the LKRT, a reciprocal link to the LKRT seems reasonable. -- Visviva 23:32, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

Re-evaluating the Revised Romanisation policy

It has been quite a while since the policy to adopt South Korea's Revised Romanisation (RR) for Korean names (apart from North Korean names) was introduced. I recognise that to change policy now would be cataclismic, but I find it surprising that there seems to have been little discussion about the apropriateness of the policy all these years. My guess is that relief about having a set policy and a set convention and the fear of opening a can of worms again won out. Well, at the risk of opening that proverbial can, I claim that we should at least stop at think whether it was a good idea to adopt the RR.

I have my own issues with both RR and McCune-Reischauer (MR), and so do most people, it seems, that care about the topic of Korean romanisation. Neither of the two is inherently superior to the other in my opinion. So the considerations should be that of convention and usefulness.

The inescapable fact is that the vast majority of existing scholarly work on Korea uses MR. This includes encyclopaedias, library catalogues, the US Library of Congress... Universities continue to use MR, and I personally have consistently used MR for academic papers all my life, not because of my personal preference, but because that was the accepted academic standard. Koreanists dealing primarily with English-language material are going to be much more familiar with MR.

On the other hand, many native Korean speakers today find RR generally more natural and easy-to-use than MR—it's the reason it was developed in the first place. Sceptics doubted RR would take hold outside of South Korea, though, which is why the policy decision to use RR on Misplaced Pages was so significant. I assume native South Korean Wikipedians played a large part in the adoption of RR as Misplaced Pages policy, and doubtless many of them were motivated by a certain zeal to spread RR outside of Korea. I initially dismissed the attempt to replace MR with RR a quixotic quest destined to meet a lot of resistance from most scholars of Korea.

Well, a few years on, we already have a considerable body of knowledge accumulated on Misplaced Pages about Korea following the RR convention. It's too early to say if RR will keep gaining momentum. I cannot think of any large-scale, well-known English-language reference source besides Misplaced Pages (and those sites) that uses RR. Thinking that the decision of a handful of Wikipedians is going to bring about the international acceptance of RR is obviously somewhat delusional. But it's clear that we bear a certain responsibility in setting standards of usage, so at the risk of sounding like I'm anti-RR, I urge people to stop and deliberate on the pros and cons of the current policy informed by the past few years of experience and on whether there is any justification now for revising the policy. --Iceager 07:55, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

Hmm... Well, personally I like RR because it's easy to use, even though I'm not a native speaker. If you can read Korean, you can write in RR. That's certainly not the case for MR, which has all sorts of arcane rules and exceptions, as well as a maddening number of diacritics. One consequence of this is that it's almost never used consistently -- in fact I've read pretty widely and have yet to find a work that doesn't have glaring inconsistencies in its use of MR... Another consequence is that it's a real pain to type. I wouldn't relish writing an article and having to scroll down for diacritics several times in each paragraph.

RR hasn't yet overcome the inertia of the KS community, but I don't really think that needs to concern us. Our work should reflect scholarship and research, but Misplaced Pages's goal is to make information available, not to participate directly in the academic discourse. Of course, that isn't an argument for RR per se, just an argument against accepting MR on academic-usage grounds.

There are some creditable reference works out there now that use RR; presumably there will be more in the future. These include Korea Annual, the Handbook of Korea, and Korean philosophy: Its tradition and modern transformation (possibly all volumes of the Anthology of Korean Studies). All such works I'm aware of originate in South Korea, but they shouldn't be rejected out-of-hand on that basis.

In sum, I think the existing policy works well. It's not perfect, but I can't think of any good reason to change it. Thanks for bringing this up, however. -- Visviva 13:19, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

I agree that neither MR nor RR is superior to the other - and I tend to think that there really can be no romanisation that people have nothing to complain about.

MR is seriously hard to use, though. It's firstly difficult to type, and secondly difficult to get it right. For me, when neither system is better than the other in terms of how they are transcribing Korean, I tend to go for the easier-to-use RR. How difficult it is to type MR is probably less of an issue with academic papers, but I have the thought that if Misplaced Pages's policy were to use MR, people would be less willing to contribute, simply because there are so many lazy people, you know :P "Damn, if I correct that bit in the article, I have to somehow dig the o and u out with the weird thingies above them, so I can't be bothered. I can't be bothered figuring out what the complicated MR is for this mess either. I think I'll just leave it." -- KittySaturn 14:26, July 18, 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for bringing this issue up, and also thanks for the way you did so. I remember the debate over how to spell 한글 some time ago (we agreed that it was an English word and thus did not have this discussion before). The reason we settled for RR, I believe, was largely/purely its ease our familiarity with RR. It is quite important to have a convention in terms of avoiding duplicate articles (I believe we did root these out just over a year ago), but whatever the convention, we'll always need redirects. Korean romanizations are a mess, and its not our task to resolve this. However, we do need some form of platform to work on. Kokiri 15:28, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

Just as a thought: The Oxford Manual of Style (2002) suggests the use of McR, but without ' and ŏ, thus Pyongyang rather than P'yŏngyang(; and as a consequence no difference between North and South Korea). Kokiri 10:01, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

I'll contribute my two-cents' worth. When I started editing Korea-related articles in 2003, the practice of using Revised Romanization was already in place. The reasoning was that that is the official system in use in South Korea, so at the very least for articles on South Korean topics, that system should be used. Now, there are arguments both for and against such a line of reasoning, and I personally feel that McCune-Reischauer probably does a marginally better job than the Revised system of representing the Korean sound system to non-Korean (at least English-speaking) readers in such a way that they can produce a plausible approximation of the Korean pronunciation of words and names. So from a point of view of authentically representing the Korean sound system, McCune-Reischauer might be a better way to go. But there are at least two reasons to stick with the Revised system:

1. It's the system used to spell South Korean place names. Switching, say, all articles on SK place names to McCune-Reischauer would needlessly introduce a fair amount of confusion.
2. As Kokiri pointed out, it is very easy to screw up McCune-Reischauer. I agree with Sewing.Even papers and articles written by KS scholars are often rife with M-R spelling errors, such is the rigour and meticulousness demanded of people using the system. The Revised system has the advantage that it is probably marginally more difficult to screw up, and easier to get right. This is a consideration for Misplaced Pages, since anyone can edit any article, and going through and fixing romanizations is painful (believe me, I've done it).

All that said, please keep in mind that Korea-related articles already show the article title rendered in both romanization systems in the Korean name table. When reading article A, if the user sees B mentioned and a Wikilink to article B and clicks on the link, the user can then see the M-R romanization for B. -Sewing - talk 23:38, 13 September 2005 (UTC)

From my experiance the RR is used by new books in the west, too. My tour guide "Moons Handbook South Korea" (from January 2004) uses it and so does my German Korean language book "Koreanisch für Anfänger" (from 2005). -- IGEL 00:20, 20 September 2005 (UTC)

I agree with what Sewing has written and would like to add a few arguments against giving MR precedence over RR.

If you want a tradeoff between simplicity and accurate reflection of pronunciation, either Yale or RR seems better than MR to me. As far as I see, while MR might have been widely used in many areas before RR was devised, Yale rather than the other two seems to establish itself as the romanisation of choice for linguists.

South Koreans always used their own romanisations made to resemble English spelling ("Hankook") for names. MR's awkwardness to learn and use hasn't been helping much with this. If we don't allow RR some time to gain popularity, chances are high this won't ever change.

While I find RR's official definition a bit vague and – concerning hyphen usage – too lenient, at least there is one authority for it. With MR, you have not one but many romanisation traditions in different institutions each calling theirs MR and all with slight differences, e.g. whether to soften the consonant after a hyphen.

If I'm not mistaken, you are fairly free in deciding where to set hyphens or even spaces in words, which renders it less usable for search. Is the spacing in "Chosŏn Minjujuŭi Inmin Konghwaguk" arbitrary? Are "Chosŏn Minjujuŭi Inmingonghwaguk" or "Chosŏn Minju-juŭi Inmin Konghwa-guk" allowed? As soon as you decide to insert a space, the letter after it also changes, e.g. g→k, which might confuse some.

As long as MR was the only thing in town, the majority of publications didn't care to use it and made up their own romanisations, or got McR wrong. The worst thing about it is that when there's no diacritics on vowels, e.g. in a newspaper, you must guess whether there weren't supposed to be any, or whether they have been dropped. This won't happen with RR. Likewise, if a newsreader who does not know how to pronounce Korean reads RR eo, o, u or eu, it's easier to guess what he meant compared to his reading MR o or u. – Wikipeditor 17:50, 24 September 2005 (UTC)

Korean names of provinces

Hi! I made this suggestion a few minutes ago on the German wikipedia. Why are the names of the provinces not written the korean way? For example Jeollabuk-do instead of North Jeolla. I guess, most provinces of other countries are written in the original way, for example Vest-Agder. Outside of the Misplaced Pages, the complete Korean names are also more common, at least according to this google fight. What do you think?

• South Korea: North Chungcheong -> Chungcheongbuk-do, South Chungcheong -> Chungcheongnam-do, Gangwon -> Gangwon-do, Gyeonggi -> Gyeonggi-do, North Gyeongsang -> Gyeongsangbuk-do, South Gyeongsang -> Gyeongsangnam-do, Jeju -> Jeju-do, North Jeolla -> Jeollabuk-do, South Jeolla -> Jeollabuk-do,
• North Korea: Chagang -> Chagang-do, North Hamgyong -> Hamgyong-pukto, South Hamgyong -> Hamgyong-namdo, North Hwanghae -> Hwanghae-pukto, South Hwanghae -> Hwanghae-namdo, Kangwon -> Kangwon-do, North Pyongan -> Pyongan-pukto, South Pyongan -> Pyongan-namdo, Ryanggang -> Ryanggang-do

-- IGEL 00:34, 20 September 2005 (UTC)

Agreed. I've hardly ever heard anybody use the English (or even German) translated name. buk/nam-do seems to be as common as it is official. – Wikipeditor 17:55, 24 September 2005 (UTC)

South Korea is done. -- IGEL 17:06, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

hanja in placenames

how about reconsidering the need for hanja in korean templates? for royalty, i think hanja is relevant, since they are historic figures & historical records are in hanja. present-day personal names, i think could go either way, since they are still sometimes used in south korea, although fading away.

for south korean city and district, & especially university names, i don't think hanja is helpful for english readers, as they are generally not used anymore. in north korea, hanja is not used, so i don't see why it would belong in wikipedia. if hanja is relevant (in disambiguation or some history contexts) they could always be in the article. (sorry, i changed Template:Infobox Korean city before i found this page for discussion) Appleby 06:45, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

could maybe someone make a generic hangul + hanja infobox, as well as a koreanruler infobox (right now, there's only ruler infoboxes for 2 or more names) for those rulers whose birth names are not known? for some korean ruler articles that used the generic infobox, hanja is relevant but will be lost. i was going to replace them with the ruler infobox, but there isn't one i can use, & i'm a relative newbie. it's a lot of work, but i feel strongly that we should use hanja only when relevant, not as a default in all korean templates.. if nobody else does it, i will learn to make the needed templates. Appleby 05:34, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

Where Hanja is remotely used (like romanization), then I think it should be included. The decision has already been made to push this off to a box on the side, so I don't see the cost of adding it in. Hanja should be included in the very least for historical figures, South Koreans, and historical places and events. (note: I'm Chinese so I'm biased. I personally find the Chinese characters very useful when reading about Korea-related topics.) For royalty, you can take a look at what's been done at Template_talk:Zh-tsp#Like Templates--Jiang 07:51, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

Although infrequently used daily, Hanjas are on the official records of names of people in South Korea. Place names have their roots in Hanjas too. — Instantnood 08:39, 17 November 2005 (UTC)