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Is anyone on Wikipedia aware that RR's rendering of the underlying pure vowel in 엄 (taken directly from the defunct and ridiculed MRE system) was a historical mistake based on an erroneous assumption about the French spelling of 서울 as se-oul (which Koreans incorrectly assumed was seo-ul)? (reported in an academic journal edited by David McCann). I will have to get the contents of that article and post in on Wikipedia; it seems that many of the egregious shortcomings of RR have never been discussed. Even so, the ambiguity that results from keeping this MOE/RR mistake is simply unacceptable in this case. The reader doesn't know whether "hwaeom" is "hwa-eom" or "hwae-om." Of course an educated reader familiar with international spellings would naturally conclude that the pronunciation should be "hwa-e-om!" -DoctorW 06:07, 18 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
As long as we're using RR, we don't have much choice about "eo." However, you do have a point about ambiguity. How about moving the page to "Hwa-eom"? -- Visviva 07:11, 18 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Your solution is that of the old South Korean Ministry of Education (MOE) system, on which the RR system is based, a system that was universally reviled among academics, and which has been empirically shown to be cumbersome and misleading. Why does a very small number of uninformed people on Wikipedia agreeing by majority vote on something make others here act like it is cast in stone, as though the use of McR is equivalent to a mathematical error? Has anyone here noticed that virtually no publishers not under pressure from the Korean government have embraced RR? It's a bad system! Wikipedia uses both RR and McR anyway, and should certainly use McR in this case, and if those involved were familiar with the issues, they would use McR (without the superscripts), like everyone else. -DoctorW 07:36, 18 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm... well, now I'm not sure what you're saying. Is it a) there is something particularly wrong with rendering 화엄 as Hwaeom, which does not apply to other Wikipedia articles ... or b) the default use of RR for all non-North-Korean articles, currently stipulated by Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Korean), is foolish and wrongheaded?
If a), please clarify; I don't actually see how RR leads to any more problems here than it does in any digraphic context. Some users, like the American general in Welcome to Dongmakgol, may pronounce Gangneung as "Gang-knee-ung" and Hwaeom as "Hwa-E-om" ... but those users are likely to be confused by any systematic romanization. If b), please take the discussion to Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Korean). The last time this issue was raised, there appeared to be a consensus in favor of the status quo, if only because RR is vastly more straightforward than MR. But as you say, perhaps we were simply uninformed; if so, please share your information with us on that page, so that we can make Wikipedia better.
Absent either a change in the naming conventions or an explanation of why Hwaeom should be excepted from them, I find the move of this article very difficult to support. While the previous name could be read as 홰옴 (hwae-om), MR and RR seem to agree that the current name can only be read as 화옴 (hwa-om).-- Visviva 14:06, 18 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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