Language Log

After visiting the massive National Museum of Korea in Seoul, I was eager to go to the National Hangeul Museum nearby.  Alas, it is under renovation, so I was unable to enter it this time, but I will go back on some future occasion when I travel to Korea.  I did, however, manage to buy two facsimile versions of the Hunminjeongeum 훈민정음 / 訓民正音 ("The Correct / Proper Sounds for the Instruction of the People), a 15th-century manuscript that introduced the Korean script Hangul, one for the populace and one for the literati.

Several of the comments to this post, "How to say 'Seoul'" (5/12/25), prompted me to think some more about a problem that had perplexed me from the time I did a review of The Korean Buddhist Canon: A Descriptive Catalogue, by Lewis R. Lancaster, in collaboration with Sung-bae Park (Berkeley and Los Angeles:  University of California Press, 1979).  That was nearly half a century ago, but I still remember keenly how difficult it was to romanize the titles and the proper nouns.  The hardest part of that was dealing with what happened at syllable boundaries.  It was obvious that different authorities romanized the sounds in discrepant ways.