quick question

[kaigou]

For the Korean or Korean-familiar folks on my flist, there seem to be several ways to anglicize the honorific, but I'm not sure if there's some rule going on here or if it's just personal preference or something:

ajusshi
ajeoshi
ajeosshi

is there a most-common or most-accepted way to anglicize it?


I see the 'eo' for 'u' every now and then, like 'Jeong' for 'Jung', but I've also noticed that this 'eo' gets included most often when it's a Chinese-speaking person doing the anglicizing. Maybe it's an ear-thing, in terms of the sounds we're primed to hear, depending on our language, so to Mandarin-ears, the 'u' sounds closest to the sound that'd get an 'eo' combination in pinyin, or something?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I had the same problem looking for Ho Dduk. Ho Dduk got more hits, but ho ddeok and even ho tteok were used maybe a third of the time, and sometimes hyphenated and sometimes one word. Enough that I wasn't sure what was right.

Amazon sells ho dduk as 'korean pancakes' which I guess avoids the spelling issue.

[kaigou]

True, and in a fiction work, I could just say "mister", but that doesn't really have the same implications as "ajusshi". Not that English readers would know, but there's more room for the characters to react (especially as the one being called that is not, by common standards, an "ajusshi", being only in his mid-twenties) -- using "mister" and having someone take it wrong would cause more of a trip for English readers, as they probably already have a personal understanding of "mister" and might layer more expectations/misunderstandings on the character about his reaction. Make sense?