Standardize “South Korea” before “Korean”

by Rian

There is a tidbit racist commentary on the history of unicode, called “Korean mess”. It is completely unrelated to the topic on hand, and frankly I do not wish to comment on the subject as most op-eds I’ve read ended up in a blazing hellfire for most. To give some tastes of what is at hand, there are at least three groups of Korean speakers (North, South, and diaspora), two governments and their regulations, and multiple companies who had stakes on the matter. Unicode headache is mostly for developers, especially the ones who have not worked outside of latin alphabets, but the problems related to standardization, the one I experienced, still plagues us all to this day.

The problem on hand today is the name of the country, not the people, nor the language, nor their alphabet sets. It is South Korea, the name of the country. Have you ever tried selecting South Korea from the alphabetized list of countries? The sorted list helps only so much. I had the displeasure of trying it again while I was placing an order from overseas. It’s a living hell that is serving the angels of bureaucracy at its finest. Here is the list of names that I have encountered and heard of so far, and this list is from English websites only: (therefore Corea is not on the list)

• D: “Daehanminkuk”, “Daehan Minguk” (side note: just, why?)
• H: “Hankuk” (side note: touché)
• K: “KOR”, “KO”, “Korea”, “Korea, Republic of”, “Korea(Seoul)”, “Korea, South”
• N: “Namjoseon” (side note: apparently found by an intl. student, but seriously?)
• R: “Republic of Korea”, “ROK”
• S: “South Korea”
• 漢: “大韓民國” (side note: oh for f* sake)
  

Looking at the list, I think the problem stems from at least two roots. One, developers are whipping up new solutions to the problem the postal union has solved with country codes. There is no need make a new list when there is already a working alphabetized list. Also, there is no need to anglicize Republic of Korea, because the native Korean speakers wouldn’t dare to do that —that’s an English thing. Two, there is more than one party involved claiming to be the “real” Korea, and I was able to find a Korean op-ed claiming to have taken offense from the usage of the term “South Korea”. Let’s get practical. Enforcing ROK or Republic of Korea on official documents, I understand and it is a needed practice. However, on the issues of addresses, most people don’t even know which Korea is the homeland of BTS. South Korea should not only make its name distinguishable, but properly accessible.

And developers, —I cannot stress this enough— don’t bother trying to anglicize or use formal sounding hanja for the actual Korean name of South Korea. There is a historical rabbit hole —an exciting journey— behind how Korean dynasties have chosen its name, but let’s not get into that. Most Koreans and Korean speakers understand that when someone say “Korea” outside of history and archeology, the speaker is alluding to present events. Same goes true with most English speakers I believe.