Wednesday, April 07, 2004

RENAMING SEOUL

Antti Leppanen notes that the powers that be are proposing to invent a new name for the ROK capital for the ease of Chinese speakers. There are a number of proposals aimed at approximating the sound of "Seoul" (서울) in Chinese. None of them, in my humble estimation, are very elegant or do a very good job. Alternately, there are also proposals for rendering the meaning of Seoul with phrases like Hanjing (韓京) or Zhongjing (中京). Whatever the committee decides, my question is how they plan to promulgate and enforce such a change. Will the ROK government insist that Chinese maps switch to the new Korean rendering of their capital in Chinese? If not, why should it expect anyone to follow their lead?

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