@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”.
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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.