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Kalius
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Kriegsgewitter
Aug 2002
time: 16:36
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I was just looking over some Google news wires and found this:
quote:
North Korea's nuclear standoff is likely to enter a new phase in the near future with signs of development with China, one of the six parties concerned, sources said.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said Chinese President Hu Jintao will visit North Korea upon the invitation of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.
A specific date is yet to be revealed, but some predicted the trip may happen within the first half of this year.
June will mark one year since the last round of the disarmament talks. Leaders of the six-party framework - the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia - have increasingly stated the standoff cannot continue for much longer.
Experts here said Hu Jintao's visit to North Korea will be significant to the disarmament discussion.
"China will show its signature diplomacy by making the presidential visit, saving face for Kim Jong-il and at the same time strongly implying the North should return to the six-party table," said Park Young-ho of the state-run Korean Institute for National Unification.
Pyongyang has stalled since Feb. 10, when it released a statement claiming to possess nuclear weapons and would refuse to attend the six-party talks unless Washington drop its "hostile" policy on North Korea.
In an apparent effort to soften the situation, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice used much of her time during the Asian tour urging the North to resume talks and acknowledging it as a negotiator.
Sources said the Hu Jintao visit has been considered a possibility since last year and suggested the trip is highly likely to occur before the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in September in South Korea.
"Positive gestures will be expected from North Korea upon the visit of Hu Jintao," Park Young-ho said.
South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon also talked about the looming end of the six-party boycott.
"By June, it will be a year since the last round of the six-party talks. Haven't we waited long enough?" Ban said in a morning debate hosted by the Korea Regional Policy Institute in central Seoul yesterday.
"Secretary Rice description of the North as a 'sovereign state' during her Asian tour was a gesture crediting Pyongyang as an equal negotiating partner," Ban said.
Ban also said there was no deadline agreed among the five of the six-party members on North Korea's return to the table but that a resumption of the negotiation was a priority.
On her last stop in Beijing earlier this week, Rice warned that Washington may consider "other options" should Pyongyang continue to boycott the talks. Other options may include referring North Korea's nuclear program to the United Nations Security Council, according to experts.
In an interview with The Nation, North Korean Ambassador to Thailand O Song-chol said Pyongyang was ready to go to war with the United States over the Stalinist state's contentious nuclear program. Chol added that North Korea was also prepared to enter into peace talks to resolve the dispute in the interview.
Chol urged the United States not to refer the case to the U.N. Security Council, saying the move would be tantamount to a declaration of war, the Nation reported. |
The first part gives a lot of hope to the talks, but that wardrum beating at the end is a bit of a shudder.
How serious is NK about going to war if the UN gets involved?
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Q Cubed
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t3h y3ll0w p3ril
Apr 1999
time: 23:36
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Accurate, mostly.
It's pronounced Kim Jong Ill, where the o is like oh. They're not using the MOE romanization system (then again, why would they, it's SKorea's...), and they're using the older McCune-Reischauer system.
Now, the trick is when you get to some other names. Like... President ROH Moohyun? The letters for his surname are "r" and "oh", but it's pronounced "noh" instead. It is also occasionally written NOH Moo-hyun, and so on.
There's Lee, which can either be the Lee with "l" and "i", or it can just be the "i" sound... so it's sometimes romanized I, Yi, Rhee... Syngman RHEE, for instance, where he switched the order of his name: Syngman RHEE is also YI Seungman, for instance.
There's Choi, which should be pronounced more as Chae, there's Park, which is more Pak...
It's accurate. Mostly accurate.
Good rule of thumb is to assume that the first word you see as their surname, and the last two parts as their given name. Look for hyphens. If any part of the name is hyphenated, that's going to be the given name.
...and this isn't even getting into the fact that some Koreans have one or three+ syllable given names, like the actor JANG Hyuk.
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Q Cubed
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t3h y3ll0w p3ril
Apr 1999
time: 23:36
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quote:
To be perfectly honest, it's hard for Europeans like me to tell Chinese and Koreans apart by names . Most people I know can't even tell the difference between writing used in China/Korea/Japan. |
 I know.
Rules of thumb:
Multisyllabic last names tend to be Japanese or SEAsian, such as Filipino or Thai. The key to distinguishing between them lies in how their names sound. Filipino tend to sound vaguely latin: Zarate, Aquino; Japanese tend to have a very regular pattern of consonant-vowel, like their language: Aoyama, Inoue, Ito, Koizumi. SEAsians are trickier.
Monosyllabic last names are common in China, Korea, and SEAsia as well, such as Vietnam. Rule here is: Park/Pak, Choi/Chae, Kim, Han, Baek, Noh/Roh, Oh, Kang, and Yi are almost assured to be Korean. Chang, Hwang, Chung, Yang, Lee, and the like, are harder to determine. Chinese names will be similarily monosyllabic, but you'll also more often see them with vowel patterns very rare in Korean or SEAsian, such as: Chiu, Liu. Vietnamese, well, you've got Nguyen and the like. Note: Vietnamese also have the name "Kim"--but if it's not a surname, then ignore it for the purposes of this generalization.
As far as the written languages: if you see circles, squares, rooftops (as in: /\ ) and the text seems very componentized, then it's Korean. Japanese will look more fluid with lots of very simple symbols mixed in with lots of complex ones (which are the Kanji--Koreans use these too, but not as often, and they're called Hanja). Chinese is loaded with lots of complex characters.
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Solver
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Apolyton Duke Of Something
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Latvia, Riga
Sep 2000
time: 07:36
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Yep, my rules of thumb for writing are similar. If it looks very complex, it's Chinese, if it has something that I might even be able to draw, it's Kanji . Actually, I wonder how the Chinese are able to write... I mean, there are obviously many people who do, like me, have awful handwriting and poor drawing abilities. So, how do these people manage to write Chinese?
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trev
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Adelaide, Australia
Feb 2003
time: 15:06
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North Korea has always been the greatest threat to world peace and should have been confronted before Iraq. There needs to be a serious strenghening of South Korea's army and other forces in South Korea so that the North Korean's can see that the world is serious about confronting them. These people only respect serious strength and that must be positioned in South Korea, preferably by multiple nations. There must be no more pussyfooting about with the North Koreans.
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All times are GMT. The time now is 05:36.
Apolyton Time is 00:36. |
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25-03-2005 15:41
. Most people I know can't even tell the difference between writing used in China/Korea/Japan.
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