basic answer: "ajusshi" is the most common way to anglicize it, but it's really just up to personal preference.
long answer: the monster explanation below
I'm just assuming you have basic Chinese/Korean language background, so sorry in advance if I repeat things you already know...
Korean is pretty hard to romanize because many of its sounds can't be expressed with just letters; they're somewhat tonal and depend on how you move your mouth when you say them. This may not make a whole lot of sense, but Korean is similar to Cantonese in that you "bend" the sounds.
Mandarin and Japanese have very clear-cut/phonetic pronunciations [and thus pin yin and romanji are relatively easy to read for Anglophones]; for example the character 你 [you] has a very hard i sound, and pretty much anybody who hears it would spell it as "ni" or perhaps "knee".
However Korean and Cantonese can be interpreted different ways. In Cantonese, 你 [you] is pronounced like "lay" [if you ignore any type of tonal infliction]. But since Cantonese is so dependent on the stresses of a word, people often add letters to "explain", so to speak, where to add stress. Since it's really up to personal interpretation, one person would spell it "leigh", another "layh", and another "lei."
tldr; Korean is painful to romanize because its sounds can be interpreted differently
Written in hangeul, the word "uncle" is "아저씨"
This is where is gets confusing. Since English has borrowed from so many different languages, one letter/letter combination can be pronounced many, many different ways, and varying letter combinations can be pronounced the same way [the infamous fish = phiti, for example].
This is not so in pretty much every other language. At least in the ones I have studied [French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Korean], there is one way and one way only [...okay, maybe a few irregular ways] that any given letter combo/character is pronounced.
Hangeul is somewhat of an alphabet - each character has one [or more] consonants and one [or more] vowels. The word "아저씨" can be broken up like such 아 = a , 저 = jeo , 씨 = sshi
The vowel ㅏ has a soft a sound. However, since vowels cannot stand on their own in Korean, you add the ㅇ to form the character 아. The "ㅇ" adds no sound of its own, it's basically a place marker for grammatical purposes.
And then you have this vowel. "ㅓ". One of the hardest vowels for English-speakers to pronounce, it is often written as "eo". It is kinda pronounced like "awh" (but more 'throaty') like "aw man, why is Korean so difficult?" (keep in mind however, that every person says "aw" a little differently, so the way I say it may not be how you would say it.)
The main reason why "ㅓ" is sometimes written as "u" is because, quite frankly, "eo" is a very weird combination to the English eye. Since English-speakers don't read "eo" very often (and "eo" in "eon" is nowhere close to how "eo" is pronounced in Korean), we don't have any background on how to say it. However, we do know how to say "u", and context tells us whether it is a hard u or a soft u.
Of course, since "ajusshi" is a foreign word, it's hard to tell how to say it anyway. -__-
(this means that a lot of korean names that end in "hyun" are technically "hyeon"! yeah, this blew my mind too)
The consonant ㅈ is a "j" sound, so ㅈ (j) + ㅓ (eo/u) = 저 (jeo/ju)
Finally, you have the character 씨. The consonant is "ㅆ" and the vowel is "ㅣ". "ㅆ" is really the consonant ㅅ (which has the s sound) written twice - it means that the s sound is stressed, and you have a hard s. This is sometimes written as "ss", but also written as "s" because you don't have such a distinction in English.
"ㅣ" is the hard e sound, but is written as "i" (like in piano) because "ee" looks kinda silly.
Thus 씨 can be written as ssi or si. However, in spoken Korean, there is an h sound added for ease of pronunciation, and that is why 씨 is spelled "ssi", "si", "sshi", and "shi"
Depending on how closely you want to follow the character, "아저씨" can be spelled many different ways. While "ajeosshi" follows the hangeul most closely, since Korean does not have a set Anglicization pattern, other spellings are perfectly acceptable.
I hope this helped!
[I figured I should stop here, 'cause I could get into a whole lengthy talk about hangeul OTL]
no subject
Date: 15 Jun 2011 08:34 pm (UTC)basic answer: "ajusshi" is the most common way to anglicize it, but it's really just up to personal preference.
long answer: the monster explanation below
I'm just assuming you have basic Chinese/Korean language background, so sorry in advance if I repeat things you already know...
Korean is pretty hard to romanize because many of its sounds can't be expressed with just letters; they're somewhat tonal and depend on how you move your mouth when you say them. This may not make a whole lot of sense, but Korean is similar to Cantonese in that you "bend" the sounds.
Mandarin and Japanese have very clear-cut/phonetic pronunciations [and thus pin yin and romanji are relatively easy to read for Anglophones]; for example the character 你 [you] has a very hard i sound, and pretty much anybody who hears it would spell it as "ni" or perhaps "knee".
However Korean and Cantonese can be interpreted different ways. In Cantonese, 你 [you] is pronounced like "lay" [if you ignore any type of tonal infliction]. But since Cantonese is so dependent on the stresses of a word, people often add letters to "explain", so to speak, where to add stress. Since it's really up to personal interpretation, one person would spell it "leigh", another "layh", and another "lei."
tldr; Korean is painful to romanize because its sounds can be interpreted differently
Written in hangeul, the word "uncle" is "아저씨"
This is where is gets confusing. Since English has borrowed from so many different languages, one letter/letter combination can be pronounced many, many different ways, and varying letter combinations can be pronounced the same way [the infamous fish = phiti, for example].
This is not so in pretty much every other language. At least in the ones I have studied [French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Korean], there is one way and one way only [...okay, maybe a few irregular ways] that any given letter combo/character is pronounced.
Hangeul is somewhat of an alphabet - each character has one [or more] consonants and one [or more] vowels. The word "아저씨" can be broken up like such
아 = a , 저 = jeo , 씨 = sshi
The vowel ㅏ has a soft a sound. However, since vowels cannot stand on their own in Korean, you add the ㅇ to form the character 아. The "ㅇ" adds no sound of its own, it's basically a place marker for grammatical purposes.
And then you have this vowel. "ㅓ". One of the hardest vowels for English-speakers to pronounce, it is often written as "eo". It is kinda pronounced like "awh" (but more 'throaty') like "aw man, why is Korean so difficult?" (keep in mind however, that every person says "aw" a little differently, so the way I say it may not be how you would say it.)
The main reason why "ㅓ" is sometimes written as "u" is because, quite frankly, "eo" is a very weird combination to the English eye. Since English-speakers don't read "eo" very often (and "eo" in "eon" is nowhere close to how "eo" is pronounced in Korean), we don't have any background on how to say it. However, we do know how to say "u", and context tells us whether it is a hard u or a soft u.
Of course, since "ajusshi" is a foreign word, it's hard to tell how to say it anyway. -__-
(this means that a lot of korean names that end in "hyun" are technically "hyeon"! yeah, this blew my mind too)
The consonant ㅈ is a "j" sound, so ㅈ (j) + ㅓ (eo/u) = 저 (jeo/ju)
Finally, you have the character 씨. The consonant is "ㅆ" and the vowel is "ㅣ".
"ㅆ" is really the consonant ㅅ (which has the s sound) written twice - it means that the s sound is stressed, and you have a hard s. This is sometimes written as "ss", but also written as "s" because you don't have such a distinction in English.
"ㅣ" is the hard e sound, but is written as "i" (like in piano) because "ee" looks kinda silly.
Thus 씨 can be written as ssi or si. However, in spoken Korean, there is an h sound added for ease of pronunciation, and that is why 씨 is spelled "ssi", "si", "sshi", and "shi"
Depending on how closely you want to follow the character, "아저씨" can be spelled many different ways. While "ajeosshi" follows the hangeul most closely, since Korean does not have a set Anglicization pattern, other spellings are perfectly acceptable.
I hope this helped!
[I figured I should stop here, 'cause I could get into a whole lengthy talk about hangeul OTL]