Falcon BMS Korea Theater Airport Name Translated into Original Chinese Name
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Dear Viper drivers, the airport name in Falcon BMS always troubles me for their wierd pronounciation and recognition, quite confusing to differenciate one from another so I spent a whole afternoon translated all airport names into their original Chinese one, so that you can now understand what they means. Infos are drawn from all Korean, Japanese and Chinese sources and I’m quite confident that it should be error free.
I might do a map version as well but first of all I’ll share the excel table so that you can all have a look first. -
Lady and gentlemen, after months of research and study, I’ve finally finished my map with all the correct chinese name on them. I’ve even bought a traditional chinese version of Korea map from 1956 and a simplified chinese version of 1976. Finally the real name of these airport and VOR could be revealed !!
I build this version from the map of Red Dog with Oakdesign’s runway touch, and all chinese name has been carefully placed for best clearity. Here are some screenshots:
The map could still be updated with some missing new runway info but for now all names are complete. Here is the link for the map: https://imgur.com/a/857oGio
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The Korean language, has it’s root in the chinese language. All the cities were named this way, and it all got meanings that I will give some examples below. The korean pronounce chinese in their way, and the tranliteration goes with korean prononciation. With time the original name is harder and harder to find, especially when the young korean generations are not required to learn chinese language anymore, some of them already don’t know what their cities name means. I have to pull from all chinese, japanese, and korean sources to complete this map.
Examples:
Gunsan/Kunsan
Original Chinese name: 群山
Chinese Prononciation: Qunshan
Meaning: Grouped mountains/A group of mountainsIncheon
Original Chinese name: 仁川
Chinese Prononciation: Renchuan
Meaning: Valley of BenevolenceSeosan
Original Chinese name: 瑞山
Chinese Prononciation: Ruishan
Meaning: Auspicious MountainGimhae
Original Chinese name: 金海
Chinese Prononciation: Jinhai
Meaning: Golden SeaGangneung
Original Chinese name: 江陵
Chinese Prononciation: Jiangling
Meaning: River bankCheongju
Original Chinese name: 清州
Chinese Prononciation: Qingzhou
Meaning: State of Purity/ClearnessDaegu
Original Chinese name: 大邱
Chinese Prononciation: Daqiu
Meaning: Big hillNuch’on-Ni
Original Chinese name: 漏川里
Chinese Prononciation: Louchuan Li
Meaning: Leaking valley neighborhoodYonghung
Original Chinese name: 永興
Chinese Prononciation: Yongxing
Meaning: Always prosperous -
Hello,
I really feel unease by reading this. What’s the point of this work ?
I dare to think that there is no political message behind this, as long as yes, Hanja is an official writing method, but mostly for historical reasons.
We all know that China want to spread it’s influence on territories like for the free country of Taiwan
But South Korea is South Korea, Japan is Japan, Taiwan is Taiwan and China is China.
I indeed feel it really disturbing to see your map of Korea with chinese names of cities, because not all Korean will be able to read it while Japanese will indeed be able to read some : Seosan-si is written the same in Chinese and in Japanese : 瑞山市 and Kunsan-si for example will be written same in both languages, 群山市.
Nevertheless, in Japanese, Korean and Chinese, cities names end by 市. (-shi in Japanese and -si in hangeul and in Chinese). In Japanese, it may also end by 町 (-cho, which means town) or 村 (-mura for village). I am not sure for other languages.
For Japan :
- 福岡市 : Fukuoka-shi
- 広島市 : Hiroshima-shi
- 岩国市 : Iwakuni-shi
- 山口市 : Yamaguchi-shi
- 対馬市 : Tsushima-shi
- 石見 (existing with 国 : Iwami no kuni) was an old prefecture of Japan. It does not exist anymore.
- 岩美町 : Iwami-cho, is a small town, located in Iwami district (Iwami-gun : 岩美郡) of Tottori prefecture (Tottori-ken : 鳥取県). You probably used a very old map, which is not in use anymore. Iwami-kuni (石見国) was excluded with reform of prefectures of Japan, during Meiji era. Here, I think you are more refering to 鳥取空港 (Tottori-kuko : Tottori airport), of 鳥取市 (Tottori-shi : City of Tottori)
Again, I just don’t understand why you had this need for a map : most people here can’t understand this writing, so, it means even more difficulties of understanding.
Radium
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@Radium -
I find this entire thread very enlightening, informative, and educational as well, but I agree with your concerns.
I am especially concerned with “I’ve finally finished my map with the correct chinese name on them.” “Finally the real name of these airport.” (Grammar and lack of capitalization uncorrected)
It seems to me that the “real names” of these Korean airports would be how the Korean people pronounce them, not anyone else. Of course, I don’t know how the original and subsequent developers researched the airport names, but I would expect/hope that they tried to find out how Koreans pronounced them, not Chinese or anyone else.
Just my 2 cents.
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Origins of the names are interesting, and can seen as history that two cultures have in common with each other. Most South Koreans over the age of 40 can write Chinese characters. It’s part of the Korean heritage and I do not know any Korean person think less of their culture because of it. Does that give the peoples republic of China rights to claim Korea? No because other countries also speak and write Chinese. Singapore, for example. Singapore should by definition also have claim to Korea then shouldn’t them? Let’s give the OP the benefit of the doubt that they have no political agenda, and just trying to find the original meaning of the landmarks.
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@SoBad I’m so sorry that my wording brought concerns. I got excited for finally finishing the project and didn’t manage to order my word in a more careful manner, that was not what I meant after all, let me explain:
Chinese is an old hieroglyph language, that every character means something, in the mean time giving prononciation hint of how to pronounce them. When they are used in alphabetic transliteration only the prononciation is kept, while the meaning is lost, unless we literally translate them. But what language do we translate them to, english, french or russian, is always a choice. In order to save trouble most of the time we see only transliterations, thus, only the prononciation.
Not only Japan Korea and Vietnam, even China has this problem as well. And also Chinese character has tones, that differenciate different characters with similar prononciation, this is also omitted during transliteration. If you get a metro map with only transliteration on it, even native Chinese can’t figure out what exactly was the original name if you are not familiar with city.
To illustrate this problem better let me quote directly from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters
"Korean
Main article: Hanja
Throughout most of Korean history as early as the Gojoseon period up until the Joseon Dynasty, Literary Chinese was the dominant form of written communication. Although the Korean alphabet hangul was created in 1443, it did not come into widespread official use until the late 19th and early 20th century.[82][83]Even today, much of the vocabulary, especially in the realms of science and sociology, comes directly from Chinese. However, due to the lack of tones in Modern Standard Korean, as the words were imported from Chinese, many dissimilar characters and syllables took on identical pronunciations, and subsequently identical spelling in hangul. Chinese characters are sometimes used to this day for either clarification in a practical manner, or to give a distinguished appearance, as knowledge of Chinese characters is considered by many Koreans a high class attribute and an indispensable part of a classical education. It is also observed that the preference for Chinese characters is treated as being culturally Confucian.[83]
In Korea, hanja have become a politically contentious issue, with some Koreans urging a “purification” of the national language and culture by totally abandoning their use. These individuals encourage the exclusive use of the native hangul alphabet throughout Korean society and the end to Hanja education in public schools. Other Koreans support the revival of Hanja in everyday usage, like in the 1970s and 80s.[84] In South Korea, educational policy on characters has swung back and forth, often swayed by education ministers’ personal opinions. At present, middle and high school students (grades 7 to 12) are taught 1,800 characters,[84] albeit with the principal focus on recognition, with the aim of achieving newspaper literacy.[83] Hanja retains its prominence, especially in Korean academia, as the vast majority of Korean documents, history, literature and records (such as the Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty, among others) were written in Literary Chinese using Hanja as its primary script. %(#000000)[Therefore, a good working knowledge of Chinese characters is still important for anyone who wishes to interpret and study older texts from Korea, or anyone who wishes to read scholarly texts in the humanities. Hanja is also useful for understanding the etymology of Sino-Korean vocabulary.
There is a clear trend toward the exclusive use of hangul in day-to-day South Korean society. Hanja are still used to some extent, particularly in newspapers, weddings, place names and calligraphy (although it is nowhere near the extent of kanji use in day-to-day Japanese society). Hanja is also extensively used in situations where ambiguity must be avoided, such as academic papers, high-level corporate reports, government documents, and newspapers; this is due to the large number of homonyms that have resulted from extensive borrowing of Chinese words.Characters convey meaning visually, while alphabets convey guidance to pronunciation, which in turn hints at meaning. As an example, in Korean dictionaries, the phonetic entry for 기사 gisa yields more than 30 different entries. In the past, this ambiguity had been efficiently resolved by parenthetically displaying the associated hanja. While hanja is sometimes used for Sino-Korean vocabulary, native Korean words are rarely, if ever, written in hanja.
When learning how to write hanja, students are taught to memorize the native Korean pronunciation for the hanja’s meaning and the Sino-Korean pronunciations (the pronunciation based on the Chinese pronunciation of the characters) for each hanja respectively so that students know what the syllable and meaning is for a particular hanja. For example, the name for the hanja 水 is 물 수 (mul-su) in which 물 (mul) is the native Korean pronunciation for “water”, while 수 (su) is the Sino-Korean pronunciation of the character. The naming of hanja is similar to if “water” were named “water-aqua”, “horse-equus”, or “gold-aurum” based on a hybridization of both the English and the Latin names. Other examples include 사람 인 (saram-in) for 人 “person/people”, 큰 대 (keun-dae) for 大 “big/large//great”, 작을 소 (jakeul-so) for 小 “small/little”, 아래 하 (arae-ha) for 下 “underneath/below/low”, 아비 부 (abi-bu) for 父 “father”, and 나라이름 한 (naraireum-han) for 韓 “Han/Korea”.
End of Quote
And this, is exactly the problem I had when I’m reading the original Korean Airport names. It sounds so familiar, I know exactly it’s coming from Chinese, but I cannot be sure what character are they. Those infos were lost in transliteration and there is no way that we could ever know the chinese name before hand, unless we cross reference and find the corresponding name in languages that still kept the old form.
I didn’t know Korea geography very well before, and when I first looked at the map I couldn’t remember any of the name. They all hinted something, but it’s exact meaning is beyond my grasp. I’ll give you some example:Kunsan. Our old friend here, in the beginning I thought it was 昆山, Kunshan, the mountain of Kun/Brothers/People. Cheongju, I thought it was 中州, Zhongzhou, the center state. Gwangju, I thought it was 广州, Guangzhou, the same name with a chinese city, and for Osan, Makpo, Gimpo, I had no idea what they were, at all. And a little search showed me that Kunsan is actually 群山, without which I would never guessed, not to mention to be certain of what it was. And this, is what I meant by real/correct Chinese name, among all the wrong condidates. Under no intention whatsoever to challenge the authority of Korea for whatever the policy they might employ. I sincerely apologise for bringing up the concerns due to my poorly organised initial remarks. That is absolutely not what I mean, nor what I wanted to do in the first place. As a pilot, remembering airport names and locations is what we do and expecially when we are flying in unfamilliar terrain. My goal of this project is purely scientific, and I spared no effort trying to find the best fact. In order to find out the correct chinese name for Chik-do Island I cross referenced 10+ maps to finally be sure of it’s name. And I think this is also in line with Falcon BMS’s attitude towards modelling the most authentic F-16 sim out there.
So there you go, I’m also reasured to see that people are still interested to see the meaning of these places. I’ll do a complete name rundown of what they mean if you want.
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Thank you very much for your comprehensive and detailed explanation. Again, it was extremely interesting, informative, and educational. I enjoyed the background explanation and learned a lot. I had no idea that Korean is not a strong tonal language. In my Western ignorance, I always generalized that ‘Asian’ languages were all tonal. Finally, I also had no idea how strongly Korea’s language and perhaps even culture was backgrounded by their larger neighbors. Because of your expansive reply, I’m the wiser from participating in this thread. Again, thank you.
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@Radium said in Falcon BMS Korea Theater Airport Name Translated into Original Chinese Name:
I really feel unease by reading this. What’s the point of this work ?
This is literally the most harsh comment I could ever imagine for a post. Like Max said, we are all old now, and you broke my heart.
I didn’t know much about Korea airports before so I studied them. I encountered some difficulties so I faced them and eventually conquered them with the hard way. I know these airports from the back of my head now. And I really hope that when I learned these airports I could have a map like this, so I’m sharing my notes to all my fellow cadets, just like in any flight school. I’m so sorry that you felt disturbing about my notes.
P.S. I think I’m correct about Iwami Airport, which of course, I have no idea what it means, until I checked: Iwami Airport (石見空港, Iwami Kūkō), Stone Meet Airport
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@Radium City is also pronounced as “shi” not si in Chinese
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@jacqueslees said in Falcon BMS Korea Theater Airport Name Translated into Original Chinese Name:
@Radium said in Falcon BMS Korea Theater Airport Name Translated into Original Chinese Name:
I really feel unease by reading this. What’s the point of this work ?
This is literally the most harsh comment I could ever imagine for a post. Like Max said, we are all old now, and you broke my heart.
I have to admit that, like @Radium, I found the post weird.
You share the result of a personal job you made on airport names and it is fine.But :
1/ When you write “Chinese real name” instead of “Chinese original name” it doesn’t have the same meaning, and it could be politically misinterpreted.
2/ The resulting map with airports Chinese names will be useless for a large majority of this forum users, who don’t read Chinese.
Nevertheless :
1/ the Airport name list with their meanings in English is interesting and may helps to memorize/understand South Korean theatre airbases.
2/ A map combining Original BMS Airbase names and their meanings in English may be a useful document ?Again, not criticizing the quality of the job, nor it’s interest, just commenting the way it is presented and the use the community can do of it.
Regards
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First thing : You did it for you that’s already a good purpose ! Look: I am doing a Mirage IIIV for BMS. It is absolutely useless for our game. Why do I do it ? For personal reasons and for my own pleasure. That’s all.
Second : Japanese language is very complex and you can’t just extract kanji like that :
- 石見 : Iwami : incorrect
- 岩美町 : Iwami-cho : Iwami city : correct
- 石見空港 : Iwami kuko : Hagi-Iwami Airport : correct
You can’t just extract 石見 from the rest : it would lead to an incorrect understanding, referring to another concept. Japanese is very sensible to this.
Japanese has the concept of Kanji combinations which means that for one noun you may have one or several kanji combinations.
For example :
- 小百合
- 早百合
- 佐由里
They all mean Sayuri (girl’s name in Japanese) but with different writings with different meanings according to parents wishes.
And this is where it starts to be complex and where I was mislead :
石見空港 : Iwami kuko : Hagi-Iwami Airport. Iwqmi here does not refer to the city of Iwami but to the old region of Iwami. It’s like in France : Metz-Nancy Lorraine airport has two city names but Lorraine is not one (former region).
Then, it is very far from the city of Iwami (I assumed your map was about city names) and 石見空港 : Iwami kuko : Hagi-Iwami Airport is in fact located in Masuda 益田市.
This is why it’s always so important in Japanese to be precise with writing and particles.
In the end 石見 is really irrelevant here.
Radium
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Before I express my opinion on this post, I want to make it clear that I am Korean.
First, the theatre in Falcon BMS is Korea, so the names of locations and airports are nouns given by Koreans, and the ‘correct’ pronunciation is what Koreans call. Korea, like most Asian countries, has been influenced by Chinese culture and has a history of borrowing Chinese characters before our own characters were created. Unsurprisingly, those influences linger across languages and cultures. The same goes for a person’s name. Like more than 90% of Koreans, I also have a family name and a given name in Chinese characters. But my name isn’t read by Chinese pronunciation. Simple, because I am Korean, not Chinese. And this is an important issue of what we call identity. No matter how much research and study you’ve done over the last few months, your posting could be involved with a very sensitive issue which is a part of our history and culture, here in this community that obviously includes many Koreans too. If you are Chinese, I think you should have been more careful in posting this. Given the recent cultural and historical disputes between Korea and China, you are well aware of how unpleasant these issues are to the people of both countries. In other words, when you posted this article, you must have fully anticipated the fact that Koreans might see it and be offended.
Second, Korean has no root in Chinese at all. Our own language is Ural-Altaic, and if we look for the closest one, it’s Mongolian. As explained earlier, China has formed a strong cultural sphere compared to other Asian countries in the past and has influenced neighbouring countries. So Chinese language and writing influenced our language and writing, and it remains to this day. However, the sounds we speak, the grammar and the construction of our own language are completely different from Chinese. In particular, since our own characters were created, it is common for Koreans of my generation to not even use Chinese characters at all. Again, to be clear, while we do not deny that our culture and language have been influenced by China, we cannot admit to distorting it as if it were derived from Chinese. Similarly, just because English borrowed many words under the influence of Latin does not mean that it is rooted in Latin.
Again, this type of topic which is related to culture and history is causing quite a bit of controversy between Korea and China recently, so I think this kind of topic should have been handled more carefully. As far as I know, many Korean Simmers are already quite offended by this post.
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@z34rpm I totally agree. I was also learning from Koreans who read this place out loud so that I can remember the Korean prononciation. The map is made as a memory aid to better remember airport names and eventually in the sim it will be the Korean name that we are using. This is also why I kept all the Korean original name intact. The goal here is to learn the Korean way of saying these place while knowing what they meant in the mean time. I have never removed a single letter from the original Korean names, nor replace any of them. And it was my Korean friends that encouraged me to make the memo, because they didn’t know what some places meant either, hence my initial remarks.
But I understand. Like my explanation to SoBad above the « correct » is referring to the Chinese Character candidates which I made wrong assumptions before, not by any mean saying that which pronunciation is correct or not. It’s a Korean Place Name after all, I listed both only for academic comparisons, to see how close they were and how they differ, there is no politics at all neither from my intention nor prove of anything. Please do calm your friends’ emotions for me. I could have been more careful, your point is valid.
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But I understand. Like my explanation to SoBad above the « correct » is referring to the Chinese Character candidates which I made wrong assumptions before, not by any mean saying that which pronunciation is correct or not. It’s a Korean Place Name after all, I listed both only for academic comparison, to see how close they were and how they differ, there is no politics at all Neither from my intention nor prove of anything.
Please do calm your friends’ emotions for me. I could have been more careful, your point is valid.
The above format got messed up so I reposted the last 2 lines.
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Just like the official language of aviation is the English language (ICAO) as well as the agreed and accepted etiquette of this BMS forum is communicating in English, why deviate and depart from this?
The only welcome input would be perhaps additional information and comments related to the issue of the proper Romanization of the labels and names from specific local languages on BMS maps, charts and other flight support materials.
Here is this related to KTO:
https://www.korean.go.kr/front_eng/roman/roman_01.dohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_Romanization_of_Korean
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Chinese
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese#:~:text=The romanization of Japanese is,(d)%CA%91i%5D). -
@jacqueslees I don’t doubt that you also had good intentions to contribute to the community and didn’t mean any offence. I was just concerned that this sensitive issue would bring the ugly politicians debates into this good community.
Thanks for your understanding and apologies, fellah.
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@SoBad
can’t agree more…