About the phonology of the Korean word "Baduk"

Disclaimer: Don’t know if these soundbites are any good.

The first two sound to me like ha-doo and da-luke

On https://www.howtopronounce.com/baduk the first one sounds like Paduk and the second one is obviously wrong (“Baduke” with an US accent).

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I think it is worth noting that this is what comes out of an English speakers mouth when shown the word “baduk” :sweat_smile: totally on topic. Granted, the “b” is probably the smallest issue - the “a” and the “k” seem to be much more problematic anyway.

There are several points of confusion about what a Romanization is and what tradeoffs exist in this, and I’d like to address them.

The sort of consonant “p” and “b” here can be distinguished in two main ways: whether your vocal cords move and whether you expel air from your lungs. There’s a tendency—exceptions exist—for languages to hear one distinction as more important than the other. Most European languages distinguish “p” and “b” based on whether your vocal cords move; /p/ means they don’t and /b/ means they do. (I’m glossing over A LOT of detail here, but if you’re in a position to make a clarification about lenition, this post isn’t aimed at you!) Whether or not air is being expelled is generally heard secondarily, and while you’ll have a marked accent, if you get it wrong it’s much easier to understand than if you mix up the moving vocal cords.

Korean has the opposite approach where it first makes a distinction between whether a puff of air comes out or not and the vocal cords are a secondary consideration. A fun thing to do if you’re learning Korean is to light a candle and see if you can say “pa” near the flame without making it flicker. That is the sound /바/ makes in 바둑. European language speakers tend to hear this as a “p”, especially if they don’t aspirate the /p t k/ series; English does typically aspirate those letters and it’s a bit more of a mixed bag what we hear. However, in the middle of a word, 가방 (gabang), it is closer to a “b” sound like most European speakers would imagine.

Rather than trying to pick an intuition, MR does both. The words paduk (바둑) and p’aduk (파둑) are different, and you can see that difference unambiguously in the Romanization. The criticism has always been that it’s ugly and overkill, but RR requires you to fill in more of Korean’s phonology from knowledge of the language. Given some of the confusion on this thread about aspiration, I think that requirement is not intuitive for a lot of foreigners.

And far from being an “alien” phenomenon, this is roughly the difference between pi and beta in ancient Greek; admittedly not the Latin alphabet, but hardly a blip on the European linguistic canon either.

(Emphasis mine.) MR does not purport to transcribe hangul, and actually dates from a time when pure hangul was not the primary written form! Instead, it purports to transcribe some phonological facts that hangul requires you to assume. For this reason its still preferred by linguists working on Korean. The /p/ versus /b/ distinction it chose was the expected European one, and in that context /paduk/ is the more natural choice, far from it being arbitrary. The case for RR is that it is closer to a transliteration of hangul, though it makes some compromises there such as /seolnal/ versus /seollal/ for 설날. The bigger improvement is elimination of diacritics; no one has the keyboard to travel to Sŏul. The point being, /qa/ doesn’t map onto /바/ the way even /pa/ does.

At the bottom of all this is the fact that the Latin alphabet is a terrible fit for Korean, no matter how you split it. I would agree with the more measured point that “paduk” is old-fashioned, out of step with the South Korean government’s stated preferences for Romanization, and potentially misleading for those not familiar with Korean phonology if that’s what you mean to say. But it is not wrong because MR is a principled, established Romanization.

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Shocker

Great that you felt the need to share your valuable and constructive thoughts. We need more people like you on OGF. Good job :slight_smile:

As far as I’m aware, the majority of contributors to this thread are “more on the STEM side of things”, I think it’s irrelevant to the topic.

Having affinity with STEM subjects does not mean not having affinity with languages (or other fields).

In another direction, much of linguistics is heavily intertwined with (mathematical) logic, empirical science and artificial intelligence. It’s closer to a STEM subject than you might think.

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I think the comment was meant to imply a derisive stereotype about the personality of STEM majors.

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Linguistic pedantry is bound to get some good traction in these forums, escpecially by STEM people.

I know that Murray Gell-Man, a particle physicist who won the Nobel prize for inventing the quark model (also coining the name “quark”) is also active in historical liguistics. He is a “lumper” who tries to reconstruct a common ancentor language for the major language families of today.

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As a hobbyist linguist, I have to object here. He merely lifted the term (German for curd cheese) from James Joyce’s masterpiece Finnegans Wake. :wink:

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As far as I know the more fitting English term would be “quark”. If you search for “curd cheese” on wikipedia you will be redirected to “quark”. From the article:

Dictionaries sometimes translate it as curd cheese, cottage cheese, farmer cheese or junket. In Germany, quark and cottage cheese are considered to be different types of fresh cheese and quark is often not considered cheese at all […]

In the place where quark originated and is still mostly consumed it is not considered to be a kind of “cheese”. If you search for “curd cheese” in a search engine there is also nothing much coming up except articles about “cheese curds” which is something entirely different.

Most English speakers wouldn’t know what this means, though.

It’s like saying Skyr is the thing that in English is called Skyr. More useful would be, Skyr is kind of like Quark.

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If my internet search did not fool me then I think most English speakers also would not know what “curd cheese” is. But I’d be happy if some natives could confirm/deny this assumption.

Skyr is literally the thing that in English is called Skyr. That’s what we’ve the internet and wikipedia for.

I could live with that. But that’s not what was said. From what I can see “curd cheese” is not a description but a botched attempt of a translation.

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I’d probably confuse it with cheese curds.

However, the thing to note is that quark is not a yoghurt (despite having more similarity to it than to an average kind of cheese), but it is made by curdling sour milk, so curd cheese does describe the production process.

I guess neither is very informative. I’d describe quark as a kind of thick yoghurt with little acidity, but not salty at all either, and a texture somewhere in between jelly and cream cheese. Also, delicious.

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I think that is the only benefit that word has. I also have to correct myself. I did state the following:

This has some truth in it because the usual citizen would not consider Quark to be a kind of cheese. But I did read into it now and according to the German cheese law Quark is indeed a type of “fresh cheese” and therefore a kind of cheese.

I agree. I just think in a case like this it might be easier to just say Quark like you would say Skyr or Kimchi. Especially because the term is so easy to confuse with “cheese curds”.

Agreed.

Let’s rename the thread into "About the correct translation of the German word ‘quark’ "

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Huh, TIL about quark

Turns out everything is made of cheese

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Well, we always knew the world is a cheesy place …

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I’d venture to say that the forum is a quirky place.

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