South Korea arranged for workers detained in an immigration raid in Georgia to be released and flown home. Foreign Minister Cho Hyun is flying in the opposite direction to deal with the political and economic fallout.

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[–] -3 points 1 year ago (13 children)

Very, very few westerners can. They almost always pronounce it with three syllables.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    One of their latest advertising campaigns on british television is about pronouncing it as 2 syllables. In North America it's already pronounced like "hun day" which is pretty damn close, I think.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yeah "hun day" isn't too bad. I'm not Korean myself, but I think I prefer that pronunciation to "hi-oon-day" which is what I usually hear.

    "Hun day" kind reminds me of "win" as a pronunciation of Vietnamese "Nguyen". It's obviously wrong, but it works pretty well as a pronunciation that uses phonemes and phonotactics common to English.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Sort of, or "hun die". The actual name in Korean is 현대, which is romanized as Hyundai and pronounced almost like it's spelled. I think "hyon dey" is closer, but Korean pronunciation is a bit nuanced.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    it drives me nuts that it rhymes with Day but the Americans just randomly pick a new vowel

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    It's definitely not unique to Americans.

    And tbh I don't really blame them too much. It's spelt with an older form of romanisation which is, in my opinion, really, really awful. I don't really love more modern romanisation schemes, but at least "dae" would be unlikely to be pronounced as "die" in the way "dai" is.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yeah, this. I'm probably more aware of and familiar with world languages than the average American, but I have flipflopped between die and day pronunciations of Hyundai. I tried to figure out why that might be and I think it's probably related to the romanization differences among several east Asian languages. This seems most problematic with older romanization methods. Newer ones feel more intuitive.

    For example I'm meant to pronounce the 'ai' in Taipei, Saipan and zaibatsu as rhyming with "die", but the 'ai' in Hyundai and waifu as "rhyming with "day". So it's memorization and context. Which feels very appropriate as an English speaker when all of our shit is irregularities and exceptions!

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Yeah Modern Revised Romanisation transcribes ㅐ as "ae", which works a lot better.

    Though it introduces its own problems. For example, it transcribes ㅓ as "eo", which causes English speakers to pronounce it as "ee-oh". Take Jecheon (제천). Most English speakers would pronounce that as "jeh-chee-on". A better pronunciation would be jae-chun (with "u" being the vowel in "gut", or maybe jae-chon" (the vowel in "chop").

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