Re: nightmare butchery of lastnames (was Re: Whiteness?)

On Tue, 5 Sep 2000, H. S. Teoh wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 05, 2000 at 09:06:21PM -0400, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
> [snip]
> > <laugh>  Well, my "Lee" is an "i".  And my mom's name is Cheon Ok Seon,
> > which is technically the standard transliteration, but most people would
> > probably have a better chance of pronouncing it right if she'd gotten it
> > registered or whatever as Chun Ok Sun.  (The "soft" s, whose IPA symbol
> > I'm completely uncertain of, just doesn't appear in English.)
>
> Hmm, could it by any chance be one of the lateral fricatives? This may be
> just be totally off the wall, but I've noticed that sometimes the Korean
> 's' sounds like the English 's', and sometimes like the English 'sh'. I
That's a mutation.  Both the "soft" and the "hissing" s (the later being
'ss' as it appears in English, like "sea" or "sore," not the voiced 'z')
mutate into sh (I don't know how to render the IPA, but it's like in
"shy") in front of 'i'.  I'm talking about a doubled consonant which
doesn't sound like 'sh', but rather like 's' with the hiss taken out of
it.  I apologize for the vagueness, but I *searched* the web for an IPA
rendering of Korean phonemes and came up blank, possibly because I was
searching in English.  :-/

> Keep in mind, too, that there might be several different IPA sounds that
> are spoken by Korean speakers, but all are heard as "the" 's' sound. (This
> is the several phones to one phoneme thing, right?)
True.  One's transliterated as 's' and the other as 'ss.'  (Gotta love
doubled consonants, which I think are aspirated or something like that,
but I'm not positive.  Best/worst example in transliteration was
Ttangggut, breaking down as ttang-ggut.)  OTOH, both 's' and 'ss' are
separate phonemes.  "Sada" means "to buy," and "ssada" means "is-cheap."
So it's a minimal pair or whatever you call it (I don't know what you say
for mutations, though, as discussed above).

I remember listening to an American learner-of-Korean saying something
like, "Yeogi ssagwa idda," and I couldn't understand him because he was
saying "there's a [what the heck is ssagwa?] here."  Then I realized he
was pointing at an apple and said, "Oh!  You mean 'yeogi SAGWA itta'"
(there's an apple here).  The guy looked at me funny and said, "But I
*said* ssagwa."  And I said, "You mean *sagwa.*  You said ssagwa."  "But
they sound the same."  "Well, ssagwa doesn't mean anything and sagwa
means apple, but the siut sound doesn't occur in English."  And so on.

I'm sure parents of kids have have analogous experiences, and I'm also
sure a German speaker would wince at my attempts at rolling r's, not to
mention the "ch" sounds.

YHL