Re: Name barbarisms

Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
>On Wed, 16 May 2001, Nik Taylor wrote:
>
> > Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
> > > As for her middle name Kyung...<shaking head>
> >
> > That actually seems pretty easy to me, assuming the pronunciation is
> > something like /kjuN/, tho I could see how people might pronounce it
> > /kjVN/.  Were there other mispronunciations?
>
>It's more like /gjVN/.  I have no idea why it's so difficult.  /kjuN/ and
>/kjVN/ are the most common variants I hear.  I can't seem to get my
>boyfriend to soften the /k/ to a /g/.  <shrug>  Then again, I'm lousy at
>pronouncing non-Korean names, so....
"Soften"? Does this mean that this /g/-sound is actually a lenis voiceless
consonant, or is "softened" ="voiced"?

                                                           Andreas

PS I remain mystified that many Americans seem to have trouble telling [V]
and [@] apart - to me, a non-native speaker of English, they seem quite
different. My ears/brain tend to register them as /a/ and /E/ repspectively,
and when I speak English I tend to render them as [a] and [@]. Not that I
meet native speakers often, but as yet nobody's complained about it either.
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