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

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.)
[snip]

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
suspect the "real" sound might be one of the lateral fricatives, which of
course, has no equiv in English, and which sounds somewhere "between" 's'
and 'sh'.

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?)


T