Koguryo or Goguryeo?

(From The Korea Herald)

One of our national traits seems to be that we are used to living with problems, rather than trying to overcome or remove them. In the latest example, our diplomats agreed to deal with the history dispute with China through academic exchanges. This is truly absurd. They should have said China must stop claiming one of our ancient kingdoms as theirs, instead of agreeing to discuss with them why it is ours.

The so-called "academic exchanges," proposed in the loosely-worded memo of "understanding" between senior diplomats of the two countries in Seoul last week, can be a fatal booby trap for Korea in the predictably long and precarious conflict. To make a long story short, there are only a dozen or so historians in all South Korea who earned doctorate degrees for the study of Goguryeo. Forming a joint front with North Korea, which inherits part of the old territory of the warrior state, does not appear to be promising, if not impossible. Relations with the North remain as fragile as ever, let alone Pyongyang's heavy dependence on China's support - economic and otherwise.

The proposed academic exchanges will inevitably bring to light the drawbacks in our Romanization system, ahead of all other problems. The two different Romanized names of the ancient kingdom - Goguryeo and Koguryo - are already puzzling, and drawing complaints from a number of scholars and journalists. The problem is the confusion is totally unnecessary, if few consider it a major disaster.

Looking back, the chaos has been expected since the previous administration introduced the current system in 2000, replacing the McCune-Reischauer system. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism under former president Kim Dae-jung ignored the nearly unanimous objections from everyone with any working knowledge in transcription and the use of Romanized Korean proper names and terms for communication. Simply put, the new system, a partial modification of the old Education Ministry system discarded back in 1984, largely converts letters of the Hangul script, not the sounds of our language, into the Roman alphabet. This is a fundamental flaw of the system devised by the chauvinistic linguists at the National Academy of Korean Language. Anyone who understands why nations need standard Romanization systems at all should know this is absolutely strange.

An unprincipled mix of transcription and transliteration for transmitting the sounds and written images of Korean words, the new system faced objections from the media, ...