Re: OT: Conlangea Dreaming

On Wed, 11 Oct 2000, H. S. Teoh wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 11, 2000 at 05:57:27PM -0400, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
> > On Wed, 11 Oct 2000, Nik Taylor wrote:
> [snip]
> > > So, how'd /i/ get turned into /li/, do you know?
> >
> > Simple.  "Ee" or "I" looks Very Strange as a surname in American English
> > (I bet British and Australian and Indian and other Englishes, too), so
> > Koreans often transliterate /i/ as Rhee, Lee, Li, Yi, Yee or other
> > variations when they're filling out silly things like immigration forms
> > or birth certificate whatevers.  Then they accept most Americans'
> > resulting and understandable attempts to render the names as written in
> > English, and go on saying /i/ to each other.
> [snip]
>
> Hmm. *Could* it, by any chance, be a borrowing from Chinese pronunciation?
> "Lee" is a common chinese surname... if the Korean /i/ actually comes from
> "Lee" then it's not surprising that it's transliterated as "Lee" in
> English instead of the Korean pronunciation /i/.
Very possibly could be.  All the different /i/ subclans or whatever
distinguish themselves from each other by using Chinese characters for
their names which apparently all are pronounced as the name but look/mean
different things.  (I bet there's a lot of Chinese-mangle-ation involved
there.  At the least, Korean isn't tonal.)  And we all have these awful
rigid Chinese names anyway (awful about the rigidity, not the Chinese--a
name's gotta come from *somewhere*).  Three syllables.  Blecch.  If you
ever look at a Korean phone book all the names blur together really
quickly...and the relatively small number of surnames means that finding
a particular /i yun ha/ or /kim sung min/ or whatever is nigh-impossible
without outside intervention....

YHL, determined to give any kids (yeah, right) of hers interesting and
not-easily-mistaken-for-every-other-Joe-Schmoe-or-Yoon-Schmoon