7
votes
Why is the Korean name 이 often Romanised as 'Lee'?
The name is written in Hanja as 李 which is pronounced as Lǐ in Chinese.
Wikipedia has some information on why the spelling Lee is so common
Though the official Revised Romanization spelling of ...
- 2,954
5
votes
Accepted
Why does the name '박' traditionally get romanised to 'Park'?
My understanding from talking with some people of the family name 박, as well as studying some history of Koreans in the U.S.A, is as follows:
When Koreans began coming (primarily) to the United ...
- 3,934
3
votes
Accepted
Why is 우 often romanized as "woo"?
I deem that you already know the correct romanization is u when you follow the official Korean language romanization system. I would say that there are several reasons for using woo instead of oo and ...
- 3,238
2
votes
Accepted
Are Korean names ever written camelcase in English, e.g., HaYoon
I haven't seen this suggested in any particular style guide.
A one-off example I can think of is singer 권보아, written in Latin script as BoA.
I do write names like this myself sometimes, and agree ...
- 13.5k
2
votes
Why is the Korean name 이 often Romanised as 'Lee'?
I always considered it an 'English distortion effect' when trying to nail down the sound from Korean to English as close as possible.
Words in English that don't have any consonants look weird (이 -> ...
- 258
2
votes
Accepted
How to tell where to break syllables in romanized spelling?
Converting from Hangul to Alphabet is a lossy process, so (in many cases) you cannot know the original Hangul spelling for certain. In your example, if we had a hypothetical word "핸여", it ...
- 7,352
1
vote
Why is 이해합니다 pronounced as ihaehamnida?
This consonant assimilation is actually very common and almost ubiquitous across all languages. In this specific case, the stop sound /p/ meets a nasal /n/ and becomes a nasal /m/ at the same location ...
- 1,149
1
vote
Deciphering romanized Korean: "kama/kamuh toe olgami"
Might be the prefix "되-" (pronounced somewhat like "dweh"). It's not a word in itself, but means "again" or "re-". E.g., 되풀이 repetition, 되감다 rewind, 되돌림 undo (from "turn again"), etc.
되- is usually ...
- 7,352
1
vote
Accepted
What do "seureopgo", "eopji", and "danghaetgo" mean in a song?
seureopgo
서럽다(seureopda): to be sorrowful (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%EC%84%9C%EB%9F%BD%EB%8B%A4)
서럽고(seureopgo): changed form of 서럽다. (=서럽다 그리고(and))
eopji
없지: doesn't exist
danghaetgo
당하다(...
- 56
1
vote
Why is the Korean name 이 often Romanised as 'Lee'?
1) Note that there are Ye, Yi, Lee, Rhee etc for family name 이. But
98 percent use Lee (cf. user17915's answer)
China : 리, Korean-writing : 리 and English : Lee is changed into
China : 리 and Korean-...
- 3,041
1
vote
Why is the Korean name 이 often Romanised as 'Lee'?
When I was teaching ESL in Korea, I asked one of my adult students about the last name 이, pronounced like the letter ' e' and why did they change the pronunciation and spelling to Lee. He offered this ...
- 11
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