The typical latin speaker is the person the word “Tokio” was created for.
Different people here seem to have very different reasons for the disagreement. I addressed a specific statement in my reply that made specific points that I disagree with.
Example or didn’t happen.
That’s a good example. Basically IPA values
Korean romanizations /trollface
Not a fitting example since Korean does not have the letter (b) or (p). They do have the sounds but that was not my point.
For example a “b” at the end of a word in German is pronounced as a “p” at the start of a word in German.
Example: The p in those two languages are pronounced very differently
Did you mean at the end of the word?
Edit: I misread your comment.
Wow, that is indeed interesting. I would say that most European language speakers, and the people the word “Tokio” was created for, would consider the sound in the first video to be a (b). Really curious how this happened. Do Portuguese people also pronounce the (p) like a (b) or is it just Brazil? Anyhow this does not really affect my point as this is not the “typical” pronounciation of the letter (p). The typical pronounciation of the letter (p) will sound like that IPA (p) that is why that IPA (p) is the IPA (p).
I mean that the first and the last consonant of the German word “Betrieb” are pronounced as the last and the first consonant of the German word “Probe” respectively.
You can listen to this
The most spoken languages that commonly use the Latin alphabet (excluding heavily modified versions like the Cyrillic alphabet) are Spanish, English, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Turkish, German, French, Javanese (~Malay?) and Italian. [List of languages by number of native speakers - Wikipedia] and
[Spread of the Latin script - Wikipedia]
From that list I suppose it would be possible to compose a list of the most common pronunciations of all Latin letters, but perhaps the influence of Spanish and English would be too big to get a result that would be considered fair by native speakers of the smaller languages on that list.
Should non-romance languages (such as English) really count? In any case, I think it’s easier to just say that the default value is its IPA value. Works for most letters
I can agree with that. You are making a great point.
German is a non-roman language but it sticks very closely to the IPA. French is a roman language but it does very weird things to its letters.
By the way, I do realize that I have basically come full circle now. I have said that letters in romanizations should be used as they are used in IPA and I have said that the (b) in “Busan” (RR) is superior over the (p) in “Pusan” (MR). Even though Wikipedia says that ㅂ at the beginning of a word indicates a (p) sound.
The reason for this contradiction is that IPA knows different (b) and (p) sounds. In the European languages I’m most used to (English/German) the (p) is usually aspirated. The thing that IPA refers to as a voiceless/non-aspirated (p) is basically indistinguishable to a (b) for me. This is the reason for my self-contradiction and probably for many of the misunderstandings during this thread.
My conclusion is that the (b) in RR is better suited for English/German speakers while it does apparently conflict with the official IPA. It of course has other advantages as well so while I do think that in general romanizations should stick to the IPA, in this specific case the South Korean government made the correct decision with their choice to deviate a little bit from the IPA. Sometimes you need to make compromises.
We could say that the “proper” IPA values of letters from Latin script should be close the original Latin pronunciations of those letters, although those pronunciations aleady evolved even during the existence of the (Western) Roman Empire, and some symbols fell in disuse while other symbols were added through history.
It seems that Italian is commonly considered the modern language closest to Latin, in particular the (Logodorese) Sardinian dialect.
When I check the Wikipedia page of Italian orthography indeed it shows that the Italian pronunciation of written Latin letters is in great agreement with basic Latin letters used as IPA symbols.
One exception being “z”, which is pronounced as /ts/ or /dz/ in Italian, quite similar to the German /ts/ pronunciation of “z” and perhaps originating from the Ancient Greek pronunciation of “ζ” (zeta), although that may also have been /zd/ instead of /dz/.
Only “j”, “k”, “w”, “x” and “y” are not used in Italian spelling except in loanwords, although /k/ does exist in Italian spelled as “c”, /j/ as “i” and /w/ as “u”.
Many languages use the Latin letter “j” in spelling and pronounce it as /j/, such as Slavic languages, Northern Germanic languages, German, Dutch, Lithuanian, Hungarian and Finnish.
English, Romance languages and Turkish are notable exceptions to this.
Also, many languages use the Latin letter “k” in spelling and pronounce it as /k/ (i.e. unaspirated), such as Slavic languages, Northern Germanic languages, Turkish, Dutch, Malay, Hungarian and Finnish.
English and German are notable exceptions to this (using aspiration).
Also, some languages use the Latin letter “w” in spelling and pronounce it as /w/, such as English and Dutch.
German is a notable exception to this, pronouncing “w” as /v/. Also, some languages spell /w/ as “v”.
The IPA symbol /x/ is a bit weird. In Latin, the “x” was pronounced as /ks/, not as /x/. So I think the IPA symbol is more derived from the Greek symbol χ, because very few languages using Latin script would spell “x” and pronounce it as /x/. Listed on Wikipedia are Uzbek, Kurdish and Wolof. Many languages that have the /x/ sound spell it as “ch”, “kh”, “h”, “g” or “r” (as in French “très”).
The IPA symbol /y/ is also a bit weird. Few languages use the Latin letter “y” and pronounce it as /y/. Wikipedia lists Northern Germanic languages, German and Albanian.
Many languages that have the /y/ sound spell it as “u” or “ü”.
Today I learned that some English dialects also have the /y/ sound, for example the last vowel in “few”, /fjy:/.
Didn’t a lot of Latin words borrowed from Greek use y for υ, which makes the IPA value perfect?
Greek doesn’t use the Latin script, but it is true that Latin script borrowed the “y” symbol from Greek script. But the Romans had difficulty distinguishing between the /y/ sound and the /i/ sound, so they called it “Greek i”. Also it seems that the Greek language itself lost the /y/ sound some 1000 years ago, pronouncing it as /i/ nowadays.
But indeed it may be the most sensible choice for IPA to use the “y” symbol for the /y/ sound, given the lack of consistency in spelling /y/ in today’s languages that use Latin script.
I think it’s kind of funny you used this example to revive this thread. The use of diacritics is actually more similar to MR than RR!
I think there’s an experiment one could do to definitively say which romanization is better by the metric of “better suited to English/German” speakers:
Without such an experiment, I doubt we can come to a conclusion. I think we will find there are some strengths and weaknesses to each, but personally I feel MR matches better to English sounds. (Mainly with the ㅂ, ㄱ, ㅓ, ㅡ sounds)
There is an objective strength to RR though - the fact that there are no diacritics means that you can type romanized korean on almost any keyboard and limited character sets like ASCII. I believe this is why the South Chosun government chose it.
That alone would indeed be reason enough to choose RR over MR.
Yeah, but ioticism hit like half their sounds, so no surprise there 