Ban Ki-moon = Pan Gimun

[Mark Spahn]

Ban Ki-moon (Hangul: 반기문; hanja: 潘基文; born 13 June 1944) is the eighth and
current Secretary-General of the United Nations
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ban_Ki-moon

潘 基文（パン・ギムン、英字表記： Ban Ki-moon、ハングル： 반기문、ラテン文字転写： Ban
Gimun、1944年6月13日 - ）は、第8代国際連合事務総長。大韓民国出身。第33代大韓民国外交通商部長官。第11回ソウル平和賞（2012年）受賞者。
Source: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%BD%98%E5%9F%BA%E6%96%87

Can someone please briefly explain the
discrepancy in the spelling of this man's name?
Does the Korean pronunciation sound like
"Ban Ki-moon" to native speakers of English but like
"Pan Gimun" to native speakers of Japanese?
Is the roomaji/katakana spelling determined by
the Korean pronunciation of the name, or rather
by some hangul-to-roomaji and hangul-to-katakana
transliteration rules?
In a Japanese-to-English translation, how should one
romanize a Korean name that is spelled in katakana?
-- Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY)

[Hào Anh Lê 黎英豪]

ㅂ is typically romanized as a "b". ㅍ is usually "p", as it's aspirated.

반 has this romanization: McCune-Reischauer pan, pŏn, Yale pan, pen)

P seems to be the more correct pronunciation:

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%85%82

but Revised Romanization specifies a "b".

Hào Anh Lê

On Wed, Aug 6, 2014 at 9:03 PM, Mark Spahn <mark...@verizon.net> wrote:

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[Matthew Schlecht]

     I can't speak to how names travel from Korean into Japanese, but the English spelling of Korean names can vary quite a bit while it is always the same name in Korean.

     For example, my wife's surname in English spelling is "Rhee", but she has a nephew who spells it "Lee", and there are still others who will spell it as "Yi".  The hanja is 李, and it is always spelled 이 in Korean.  Kind of like "steen" vs. "stayn" for Stein.

     Koreans with a name that contains "문" will often spell it in English as "Moon" because then English speakers who read it will pronounce it in the familiar way, while if it is spelled "Mun", many English speakers will pronounce it to rhyme with "bun", and that's no "fun".

     Romaji is a highly imperfect way of rendering Korean, both because some sound differentiations are alien to English (bbada vs. bada), and the English spelling also imposes differentiation where none exists, such as the r/l and p/f dichotomies, since in spoken Korean it is the position within the word that dictates how it should sound.  A good example would be the English word "scalp", which many Koreans will pronounce as "scarf" because that's how the sound alternations work in Korean.

Matthew Schlecht, PhD
Word Alchemy
Newark, DE, USA
wordalchemytranslation.com

[Herman]

On 8/6/2014 21:03, Mark Spahn wrote:
> Ban Ki-moon (Hangul: 반기문; hanja: 潘基文; born 13 June 1944) is the
> eighth and current Secretary-General of the United Nations
> Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ban_Ki-moon
>
> 潘 基文（パン・ギムン、英字表記： Ban Ki-moon、ハングル： 반기문、ラテン
> 文字転写： Ban Gimun、1944年6月13日 - ）は、第8代国際連合事務総長。大韓
> 民国出身。第33代大韓民国外交通商部長官。第11回ソウル平和賞（2012年）受賞
> 者。
> Source: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%BD%98%E5%9F%BA%E6%96%87
>
> Can someone please briefly explain the
> discrepancy in the spelling of this man's name?
> Does the Korean pronunciation sound like
> "Ban Ki-moon" to native speakers of English but like
> "Pan Gimun" to native speakers of Japanese?

It sounds more like "Pan Gimun" to both Japanese and English speakers,
but the Korean letter corresponding to the initial 'p' (unoviced
bilabial plosive) here is in some cases (when intervocalic) pronounced
like 'b' (voiced bilabial plosive), so in some systems of romanization,
"b" is used in either cases. Basically, on a phonological level, Korean
makes a distinction between aspirated/unaspirated, with the
voiced/voiceless feature changing depending on context, whereas the
opposite is true of English. In English, voiced consonants (b, d, g) are
generally unaspirated while voiceless ones (p, t, k) are aspirated
before a vowel, so as result, either one is, I suppose, an equally good
candidate in terms of transcription, thus becoming a source of
inconsistency.

Herman Kahn