Oh, for sure! No one should expect to walk into a Japanese class and get all the sounds week 1, and prosody is significant. My point is only that there are European languages that are overall much closer to English with a much more forbidding phoneme inventories for native English speakers.
The prosody of 바둑 deserves a comment as well - I wonder if there’s a spelling that would prevent English speakers’ buh-DOOK
1 Like
Páduk. 
2 Likes
Uh oh, that looks dangerously close to P’aduk but I’ll take it!
3 Likes
For Dutch people (including me), the pronunciation of foreign terms tends to depend on which language we are speaking while using those terms.
Even when we know how to pronounce the term in the original language, and are able to come close if we try (which we would when speaking that language), that wouldn’t sound “right” when speaking Dutch, or it might seem overly pedantic.
So when speaking Dutch, it’s common to pronounce foreign terms as if the spelling/romanisation matches Dutch orthography to a large extent.
Examples of foreign terms with the “proper” pronunciation in the original language (which we’d attempt when speaking that launguage) vs the “natural” pronunciation when speaking Dutch (in my accent):
| term | original | Dutch butchering |
|---|---|---|
| Lego | /'lɛgo/ | /'leɪ̯ɣoʊ/ |
| Duisburg | /'duɪsbʊɐ̯k/ | /'dœy̯sbʏ,x/ |
| cap | /kʰæp/ | /kɛp/ |
| jus d’orange¹ | /ʒydo’ʀɑ̃ʒ/ | /ɕydo’ʀɑns/ |
| judo | /'d͡ʑu:do:/ | /'jydoʊ/ |
| joseki | /'d͡ʑo:seki/ | /joʊ’zeɪ̯ki/ |
The /z/ in our pronunciation of “joseki” might originate from the German butchering of the term. I suppose that historically we learned about go mostly from German players and writers.
[¹] commonly used here as fancy term for orange juice.
5 Likes
Spanish native speaker here. P (and the same for most other unvoiced consonants like t or k) is never aspirated in Spanish (aspirating it consistently instead is 100% unambiguous and perfectly understood, but sounds extremely “Anglophonic”). So it is NOT the case that native Spanish speakers pronounce the p like that as claimed.
It was only recently (a couple years ago) after over 20 years of speaking English as a second language that I started to be able to really hear and understand that there is a difference in English in the sound of the p in words like “pin” or “pan” (aspirated, not like Spanish p) and the one in “spin” or “span” (not aspirated, like the Spanish p), as a result of me getting more interested in phonetics and phonemics and becoming aware of the difference and the basic rule of when to use which. I might have been pronouncing the p in “pan” aspirated instinctively by imitation when speaking English maybe, it is hard to say, as I had no conscious perception that they were two different sounds since aspirated vs non-aspirated is not important in Spanish or English unlike voiced vs unvoiced which is a much more important difference (for the b p pair at least).
So indeed, both a “pʰ” and a “p” sound to a Spanish ear instinctively and immediately as a “p” phoneme, no thinking, the difference is extremely subtle, and none of those would ever be felt like a “b” phoneme naturally. Giving all that, the new p vs b system instead of p vs p’ is probably better to get an English speaker to correctly (at least “in a way that is understood”) pronounce baduk, but on the other hand a Spanish speaker will most likely hear “paduk” when a Korean pronounces the word, and would be understood when pronouncing “paduk” (of course when pronouncing baduk too as that is unaspirated). Hearing the pʰ vs p distinction would require special training and explanations since aspirated pʰ is a foreign sound and never occurs in Spanish.
4 Likes
The French p is also generally not aspirated, except in the combination p+i+vowel (piano, pied, pierre, pion, piailler,…). Same with the letter t.
Some years ago I heard an American speaking a foreign language quite well, except that he pronounced the unaspirated “t” almost like a “d”. He probably couldn’t hear the difference between the two sounds.
3 Likes
Despite the idiosyncratic spelling, it’s actually pronounced [dyːsbʊʁk] in German 
2 Likes
I went into this thread thinking Baduk was obviously correct, because the “b” glyph was necessary to indicate non-aspirration. Thankfully, I learned a lot of interesting factoids in this thread, such as the existence of MR transliteration. I still prefer baduk, mostly because I’m used to it, but knowing what I know now having read this thread, it seems clear that both paduk and baduk are objectively correct, they’re just using different romanization schemes, which each have good and bad sides.
3 Likes
Even languages natively written with the latin alphabet evolve their pronunciation so that their “romanization” no longer matches the pronunciation. After a while this may lead to a change in spelling, but spelling tends to be conservative, especially English spelling.
I find it interesting that many /x/ or /ç/ sounds in Dutch, spelled with “ch” (also in German), are preserved in English spelling as “gh”, but have become silent in speech.
There are many cognates between Dutch and English with this pattern, that are recognisable in writing, but not so much in modern speech.
Examples of such cognates
At least I assume these are cognates. I didn’t look them up.
acht - eight
nacht - night
zicht - sight
zucht - sigh
zocht - sought
knecht - knight
vecht - fight
doch - though
dacht - thought
macht - might
licht - light
recht - right
slacht - slaught
gewicht - weight
wrocht - wrought
bocht - bight
vracht - freight
deeg - dough
kuch - cough
2 Likes
Yeah, I tend to like such conservative tendencies aesthetically. Like a window into the past.
1 Like
At 21:12 (and again a few seconds later), Eunkyo Do (KOR 1p) says the word in question in a way I would transliterate as “padung”. I only mention it because I haven’t seen this particular suggestion in the thread yet
3 Likes
Around 21:12 she seems to be reading out loud from the chat “baduk murder mysteries”. I hear her linking “baduk” and “murder”, sounding like “padoogmurder” or perhaps “padoongmurder” to me.
About ten second later she does something similar when linking “baduk” and “movies”.
Perhaps the “k” can become voiced in Korean when linking to a follow-up word that starts with “m”?
I expect that native English speakers would tend to insert/leave a glottal stop there instead, and avoid the voicing of “m” bleeding over into the preceding “k”.
5 Likes
This is a fun one - and @gennan is exactly correct the reason it happens is the next word starts with ㅁ (“m” sound). ㄱ (k) before ㅁ (m) becomes ㅇ (ng).
I’ve heard korean speakers pronounce “bookmark” as “boongmark”.
https://www.koreanwikiproject.com/wiki/Category:Consonant_assimilation
7 Likes
Ok, I’ll try this time.
I mean, yeah obviously. But the romanization is still “Tōkyō” and not “Ü23yc23” or “QqZzq”. Can you explain why?
This is a great question that drives me nuts too.
I mean, the answer is somewhat obvious: if we use a romanisation that somewhat resembles the phonemes, then it is easier to learn and we don’t have to learn a whole new phonetic alphabet.
But the result is some awful awful legacy, such as the romanisation of the ‘r’ characters ら り る れ ろ to ‘r…’ and the ‘r’ sound, and the resulting nightmares of mispronunciation in both directions.
1 Like
Exactly! The higher the resemblance for the typical latin speaker the higher the chance to somewhat get the pronuncation right even when not knowing the foreign alphabet. So while this is not the only goal of romanizations, it is one of the goals to make it as easy as possible for the foreigner.
This again is something MR fails at (in comparison to RR) in my opinion and I have clearly outlined why I think this in my earlier comments. Of course there are many other reasons why MR is not used anymore in countries that have internet access but I have already outlined those in my previous comments as well.
What do you mean by “the typical latin speaker”? A typical person using the latin alphabet? The main point of the disagreement between you and other people in this conversation is that the pronunciation of the letters “b” and “p” differ a lot across different countries using the latin alphabet, and the “p” in language X may be closer to the “b” in language Y than to the “p” in language Y.
5 Likes
Indeed. And the same goes for many other Latin letters. I’d even say that there are very few Latin letters where there is no pronunciation variation across languages and dialects using the Latin alphabet natively. The ones that I can think of are “d”, “f”, “m” and “n”, and I’m not even sure about those.
3 Likes
No way on f. It can be the bilabial or labiodental unvoiced fricative
and d can be alveolor or dental
1 Like