#you probably weren’t expecting such a long reply😭 but i’m a language nerd i love language structure

[hongtonie]

hi hiii Theo(ry!!) can I ask why you call SeongJoong “madz” and not “matz?” :0 /gen

yeah no problem! it’s just a different romanization of the korean word/phrase but i’ll give a quick little rundown. so it comes from 맏형 which means oldest guy or oldest brother and this character > ㄷ < is the equivalent of an english “d” sound. the way madz is written in korean is 맏즈 “m a d j eu” and you can transliterate it as a t sound but in my opinion it doesn’t make as much sense here. there are letters that can make what are called t-stops when put at the end of a syllable and they’re called that because they make a sound similar to the last “t” in “that” if you’re someone who doesn’t put emphasis on it, which is probably why people write it as “matz” with a t. ㄷ is a t-stop (which i may have forgotten till just now) and another common thing with t-stops is that in pronunciation they kind of get dropped and instead you place more emphasis on the next letter, which in this case is ㅈ, the equivalent of j. so it doesn’t really make a difference because it’s not big in the pronunciation anyway but yeah i just kind of transliterate it more directly ? i guess :)