Korean Job Discussion Forums

[SirFink]

I am in the process of searching for a job in Korea and am confused by the various anglicizations (see mom? that English degree really came in handy!) of Korean city names. It seems no two English-language maps are alike.

Some are easy enough to figure out: Pusan/Busan -- same city. But most of the smaller cities get anglicized many different ways, making it difficult to search these forums for information on people's impressions of life in those cities.

So where exactly is Gyeonggi-do ? Is that slightly NW of Seoul? Is there a more popular spelling? Anyone know anything about Hwasung, a city there? Search got me zero results. And while I'm at it, does the "-do" at the end mean something akin to "state" or "province?"

[billybrobby]

as long as i've lived in seoul, i've never really figured out where gyunggido is (how do you like that spelling?). all i know is it's outside of seoul, somewhere in the mists beyond the forbidden zone. Sometimes its inhabitants come to seoul, but they are an enchanting and mysterious race whose secret rites are yet unknown to us.

[Hater Depot]

Gyeonggi-do is a province that surrounds Seoul, in the NW of the country.

Also it's romanization, not anglicization. Romanization is transliteration; anglicization is turning Rudolfo into Rudolph.

[Wangja]

Wow: Korean cities are being confirmed in the church.

[billybrobby]

[sid]

The newer spelling is Hwaseong I think. It's south of Seoul - about 40 minutes away??

[HamuHamu]

Gyeongi-do (or Gyunggi-do) surrounds Seoul like a donut, and many of the areas function as suburbs of the city (ie/ Bundang, Ilsan), but many of them are more like smaller independent towns - it depends on the proximity to Seoul and the size of the area I suppose.

I *think* Hwasung is part of Ilsan, which is almost sort of a suburb of Seoul...but I'm not sure if it's Hwaseong I'm thinking of or another place.

With romanization "eo" is often spelled as "u" , g/k are often interchanged as are ch/j, p/b, and d/t . There are some smaller towns down south that are VERY similar in their Korean spelling and are easily confused when romanized, but other than that, most of them can be sorted out with the above rules.

"Do" is a province, so Gyeonggi-do is Gyeonggi province. But, "do" is also island....isn't it?

[antoniothegreat]

I thought Hwaseong was a castle in Suwon (that's south of Seoul for you city-slickers that dont know there is a whole country beyond the Great Highways).

Gyeonggi-do, Gyeongi, Kyungi, Kyeonggi, are all the same. Sometimes I hate Koreans for not realizing 2000 years ago we were coming and to figure out if (��) is a darn G or a K. how clueless...

The Hawaiians and Samoans figured it out...

[SPINOZA]

The romanization of Korean absolutely sucks.

My proposal to one problem is to treat �� as 'oh' and �� (previously 'eo' as in Seoul or 'u' as in Park Ji Sung) as 'o'. Park Ji Sung is pronounce 'song' (as in the the thing you sing). This means that someone whose name is ��ȭ�� is Hwa Yohng in English. It's still not accurate but it's better than 'o' for �� and sure as heck better than 'eo' for ��. The spelling of Seoul must remain however. That's too mainsteam and accepted. But �溹�� is Gyongbohkgung and ������ is Bohshintang.

The ridiculousness of using 'eo' for �� can be seen in ���� (Suseo), a Seoul suburb. Before one learns Hangeul, it looks like Soo-se-yo right?

[ajgeddes]

Yeah, I agree with most of that, but �� is not the same as the 'o' sound in song. Problem is, we don't really have a good way of writing that, perhaps the best way to write it is just with a 'u'

[Hater Depot]

I like the revised romanization a lot. I hate trying to make sense of the diacritics in M-R and the Yale romanization is just batty imo. ��'s pronunciation is not as consistent as most other vowels in Korean but if it's always written as "eo" then you at least know it's not �� or ��, which you can't be sure of if it's written us "u".

[ajgeddes]

As well, it isn't English, so we don't need to pronounce it with an English pronunciation. It isn't anglikfjdlkfjadlfkzation, it is romanization, it isn't meant to be English.

What they need is just one system that they are going to stick with. Like pinyin in Chinese. People will have to learn the pronuncation of the letters. Like in pinyin, 'qi' is pronounced 'chee'. Once they find a system the like, they need to work to changing everything to one system. Kyoung (They can't really stop using this totally because of people names) and Gyeong are not the same in English, and if they keep on using both of these, there will continue to be problems with pronuncation.

[just because]

Also to the uninitiated to Korean language a lot of place names are very similar (in some cases the same as in Gwangju and Paju which have locations in both Jeollanamdo and Gyeonggido) but they can be miles apart from each other...

[Porter_Goss]

[kermo]