Open Letter to NC west - Censorship

[Fraou]

I don't know why and how in the beginning NC west got that decision about the Kun race, but i found something interest on a private forum concerning this matter. I'll just copy - paste: 

 

This is most stupid. The Gon and Kun races in Blade&Soul stand for 2 of the 4 Trigrams on the South Korean flag:

Gon/곤/earth/☷

Kun/건/sky/☰

Compare:
http://bns.power.plaync.com/wiki/%EC%A2%85%EC%A1%B1
http://www.bladeandsoul.com/en/
http://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%ED%8C%94%EA%B4%98
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagua

By changing the name of the female-only race (the epithet "*cricket*" would not be unfitting :P ) to something not Yijing-related, they are removing a major part of the fun - and destroying the harmony between heaven and earth. Players interested in wuxia literature or East Asia in general can not not have heard of the Book of Changes. That's the problem with people like Cryo and friends - they automatically assume that everybody is as illiterate as they themselves.

That whole name change is totally misguided. The scholarly transliteration for 건/sky/☰ is "Geon", where "eo" is pronounced as a long Dutch "o", like in "Seoul". The orginal translators probably thought that Western kids would pronounce it "Ge-on", so they came up with "Kun", to make it different from "Gon", which is pronounced with a short "o". That's the worst possible solution, even if you don't make the connection "Kun" -> "*cricket*".
Those names are actually Chinese, the Korean spelling having "frozen in" the Tang Dynasty pronounciation. A modern Chinese news anchor would pronounce "Gon" as "Kun" and "Geon" as "Qian" (sounding roughly like "Chen"). So the obvious solution would be to keep "Gon" for the earthy muscle men and say "Gan" for the heavenly women. In this way you preserve the almost identical Korean spelling (곤 resp. 건) but make the two races still easily distinguishable. Ah well ...

 

 

source: boards.rochand.com