In honor of the novella I wrote in week 6 of the workshop, an alien-infested alternate history story that Vernor Vinge claimed was to jazz what hard SF is to science, when my turn for facepainting came during one of our final parties, I asked whether Tina could do the script you see below. It reads “je-jeu pun-keu”, which is how one would write “Jazzpunk” in Korean. (Though I might have misspelled that first vowel… it’s always a guess whether it’s a-e or eo-e. I predict the two will be collapsed into one vowel, probably a-e, within 200 years. Which suggests an interesting idea: that the things which will be simplified in a language over time may be guessable from what non-native speakers struggle with most. I wonder if that’s actually true… hmmm. Someone must know…)
My other cheek had a cartoon sax on it. Tina deserves special kudos on a good job since, in fact, her calligraphy was much more well-performed than my own. I don’t know how she did it. If you want to see more pics from the workshop, including all my new friends as well as the odd pic of me, usually reclining with a beer or reclining with exhaustion, check out the cw06 photo pool at flickr.
UPDATE: Yeah, of course I misspelled the first vowel. I’ll see if I can’t kludge together a fix for it once I get back to Korea. If I can’t, I’m sure someone can…
UPDATE 2: I’ve fixed the pic, and will upload it to Flickr. You can see the original, with the misspelling, by clicking on the pic above. And if you wanna see the sax on my other cheek, see here.
As a rule of thumb, the a-e vowel is used to romanize English words with a short “a,” while what you’ve got there is used to romanize words with a short “e.”
But it is sometimes pretty hard to tell them apart in Korean words. If you don’t already know the word, sometimes you just have to guess. This is where a knowledge of Chinese characters comes in handy.
But I find people pronounce them exactly the same, which is why I think one or the other will disappear (just as the difference in sounds did, or mostly did, long ago).
Wish I’d looked it up, tho…
Ah well!
ship me your head and I’ll rewrite it.
(thanks for the kudos….)
Tina,
And you doubt I’d do it? Why, I have three spare heads in Korea, all waiting for use. They were cheap, Thai-manufactured knock-offs, but certainly adequate for my modest daily needs.
So are we going to have the opportunity to read these new stories?
I could let you see them via personal email, if you like. They need some revision, though, first. And you’ll also get a chance to see them in publication, eventually. :)