Japchae

[Benjamin Barrett]

On Jan 10, 2012, at 11:27 PM, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:

> On 1/11/2012 1:27 AM, Benjamin Barrett wrote:
>>
>> I have a vague impression that there is an increase in voiced English consonants, which I attribute to the adoption of the Revised Romanization of Korean in 2000 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_romanization), but I have no real evidence of such a change.
>>
>
> I think the new Romanization may very well change the prevalence of
> [spelling] pronunciations in the US. [I've noticed the analogous trend
> in Chinese (hardly anyone was named "Zhang" /ZaN/ back in the day,
> right?), although I guess Gen. Tso seems immune so far.]
>
> I'm not sure I've ever myself seen a spelling with "j" on a menu, or
> heard a pronunciation with an obviously voiced initial consonant, but I
> might not have noticed.
>
> I think the most frequent spelling in my limited experience is
> "chapchae", which would be  a simplified McCune-Reischauer spelling I guess.
>
> Note however that my experience with chapchae is heavily weighted toward
> the Midwest (esp. Chicago area), 1971-1989. Now that I've thought of it,
> it's high time to go out for some Pittsburgh japchae/chapch'ae/whatever;
> I'll see what the menu says.
>
> Any analogous tendency for "kimchi"/"kimchee" to acquire a voiced
> initial ("gimchi") so far?
>

My guess is that kimchi is probably safely set in English. Using "gimchi" would just confuse people with no benefit to the writer. Nevertheless, Wikipedia claims it is used (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimchi).

I became aware of the RR system when I started seeing Busan instead of Pusan.

Benjamin Barrett
Seattle, WA

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