I've mentioned, at various points, that Korea (whatever it's called) manages to pull a Meiji, modernizing in just under 40 years. I've also mentioned that Korea doesn't Westernize so much as it Russifies, consciously patterning itself off the Russian state under Evgeny IV.
Most of the early detailed maps of Korea are printed in Russia, with all the names written in Cyrillic. This is somewhat problematic because, early on, there are a few conflicting standards about how to Cyrillicize the Korean language, which includes a lot of sounds that Cyrillic represents poorly. Such as /w/, which in the end is rendered by the Cyrillic letter В в /v/.
Most of these maps are Latinized when they're passed off to neighboring states: Poland, Prussia, and Sweden mostly. Sweden continues to render в as "v"; Prussian and Polish both instead transliterate it with "w" /v/. And because it doesn't much matter to them (the Baltic states don't have a big stake in Korea), that mispronunciation continues to get passed along. As a result of this unfortunate transliteration, most of the world pronounces Wonju as "Von-ju."
Pretty quickly, this becomes part of Korean caricatures of foreigners: hypercorrecting all /w/ as /v/, sounding like a Nazi in a pulp action movie...
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