In honor of the maybe/probable/possible immanent collapse of the Gaddafi/Khaddafy/Qadhafi regime in Libya, I would like to draw attention to another prominent figure whose name can be spelled in quite many ways in our Latin orthography. 황정리--transliterated from Korean through the Revised Romanization and McCune–Reischauer systems as Hwang Jeong-ri and Hwang Chǒng-ri respectively--is an actor and badass martial artist. He is perhaps best known as "Silver Fox" or "The Guy Who Made Jackie Chan Cry," but also served as the chief martial arts instructor for the South Korean army in Vietnam, where he killed a man with a single roundhouse kick in a bar fight. But his illustrious career is muddied by the many names he goes by in the Latin script. To set the record straight, I shall list them all here now (adjusted for name order):
- Hwang Jang Lee
- Wong Cheng Lee
- Wong Cheng Li
- Huang Jing Lee
- Wong Ching-Li
- Huang Jang Lee
- Wan-Chung Lee
- Hwang Jeong-li
- Hwang Jeong-ri
- Huong Cheng-Li
- Wang Cheng Li
- Wang Jang Lee
- Wong Chung Li
- Wong Zheng Lieh
- Wang Jia Le
What's in 15 names? Why, but a single man, of course!
DANG! I love romanization systems because they are so confounding. even Kad-dad-fee has nothing on this guy, as you illustrated.
ReplyDeleteAnd this is why Cyrillization of Asian languages (like Japanese and Korean) is so much more streamlined and elegant, because of the more phonetical nature of the alphabet. In Russian, I've only seen him as "Хванг Джанг Ли"/"Khvang Dzhang Li" and "Хванг Жанг Ли"/"Khvang Zhang Li".
ReplyDeleteBut your pitiful Latin alphabet remains confused and cacaphonous! Kha-kha-kha!