Everyone knows I have a weirdly immoderate love for reference books. I am the one who reads dictionaries and encyclopedias recreationally, and who compulsively visits wikipedia online the way normal people visit facebook.
On Saturday, I shelled out something over a 100,000 won (a hundred bucks) for a reference book. It’s one I’ve fantasized owning for at least two years. The actual value I will derive from it is highly dubious – I’m not sufficiently advanced to get most of what it has to say. It’s A Reference Grammar of Korean, a sort of exhaustive synchronic and diachronic study of the Korean language, by a trained linguist, and written in English, which makes it at least a little bit accessible.
It has one major drawback. It’s such a huge drawback that I kept telling myself I shouldn’t buy it. It’s a drawback that has me seething with frustration every time I open it. The problem is that Mr Martin, the book’s author, opted not to use the Korean writing system in his massive tome (over 1000 pages). Instead of hangeul, he uses our own charming Roman alphabet.
This has deep limitations. The most widely used “popular” Romanizations are unworkable for such an academic study as his, since they are not, strictly speaking, “reversible” – that is, there is not a one-for-one correspondence between their letters and the letters of hangeul. Reversibility is crucial in an academically reputable linguistic oeuvre of this caliber, because you have to be able to reconstruct what the heck he’s talking about in any given example. So he opts for a modified version of the infamous Yale Romanization.
I despise the Yale Romanization, despite my deep sympathies for the issue of reversibility just mentioned. Mostly because it is nastily counter-intuitive to English speakers. The letters are just “wrong.” Consider a common phrase like “In South Jeolla Province”: 전라남도에서. The ROK government’s Romanization, which I’m meticulously loyal to in this blog, would be “jeollanam-do-eseo”. The Yale is “cenlanam-to-eyse”. How can you come close to pronouncing that correctly, with a spelling like that? It’s a bit like Pinyin, in this respect. If you have no idea what I’m ranting on about, don’t worry about it.
One might ask, why did the author choose to do this? It seems almost disrespectful of the Korean language, at some level. But actually, as a linguist, I understand perfectly. You see, people like me – people trying to learn Korean – are not, in fact, his target audience. Nor, obviously, are any actual Korean speakers – actual Korean speakers can, of course, read the reference grammars written in Korean, which abound. No, Mr Martin’s target audience is linguists. And linguists, despite being linguists, have a low toleration for being asked to learn new writing systems just in order to absorb a few charming points of abstract syntax for some given language. Personally, I find this… strange. It strikes me as lazy, a little bit – and disrespectful of whatever language is being looked at. At the least, it strikes me as vaguely unprofessional of them. But it’s a true fact about linguists, I cannot deny.
I’ve decided to tolerate it, though. The book is too useful and downright fascinating. Maybe someday my Korean will be good enough that I can actually derive usefulness from a Korean grammar written in Korean. That would be very exciting. But until then, I guess I will put up with Martin’s idiosyncratic Yale. And maybe, meanwhile, Mr Martin will make a future edition that puts the effort into putting hangeul in brackets, or something, alongside all his transcriptions. Putting the original spelling in Korean alongside that nifty reversible transliteration in that abhorrent Yale system (for all the lazy linguists out there)… well, that would be both highly professional and deeply respectful.
