as a disclaimer I TOTALLY don't speak korean so this is coming from a I've-taken-a-lot-of-linguistics-and-wrote-one-paper-on-korean-phonetics place, not a I-know-what-I'm-talking-about place
But I always figured the reason the "official" romanizations of their names didn't follow any particular pattern was because the phonetics of Korean and English match up really badly so "proper" romanization patterns are always at least a little bit ridiculous (among other things, who even thought of "eo" for ㅓ?? I SERIOUSLY ORIGINALLY THOUGHT "ryeowook, for example, went ree-oh-wook), so they were just like "FUCK IT" and tried to pick something that would make a person who read English but not Korean be able to pronounce it vaguely correctly? We English speakers are all so used to constonant-spelling ridiculousness that we DO interpret something like "hyun" as basically vaguely 현 but if I/we saw "yun" (as in Taeyeon/Hyoyeon) I think it'd be interpreted as 윤 and not 연. Idk about the oo/u Yoona/Yuna thing though because on the one hand, I remember looking up the hangul of Kim Yuna's name to see if it matched Yoona's (lol I couldn't even read it at the time), but on the other hand I still Yunho in my head as 연호 even though I know that's not it.
And then it's weird that they used oo in Yoona and not Yuri because it's the exact same and I think Yoori might even make people tend more towards the correct pronunciation??? Yuri kind of makes me tend towards something like Yurr-i rather than Yu-ri.
so basically I have no idea what is even going on or what anyone was thinking
That's kind of funny that girl!SHINee's names got muddled in translation though.
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But I always figured the reason the "official" romanizations of their names didn't follow any particular pattern was because the phonetics of Korean and English match up really badly so "proper" romanization patterns are always at least a little bit ridiculous (among other things, who even thought of "eo" for ㅓ?? I SERIOUSLY ORIGINALLY THOUGHT "ryeowook, for example, went ree-oh-wook), so they were just like "FUCK IT" and tried to pick something that would make a person who read English but not Korean be able to pronounce it vaguely correctly? We English speakers are all so used to constonant-spelling ridiculousness that we DO interpret something like "hyun" as basically vaguely 현 but if I/we saw "yun" (as in Taeyeon/Hyoyeon) I think it'd be interpreted as 윤 and not 연. Idk about the oo/u Yoona/Yuna thing though because on the one hand, I remember looking up the hangul of Kim Yuna's name to see if it matched Yoona's (lol I couldn't even read it at the time), but on the other hand I still Yunho in my head as 연호 even though I know that's not it.
And then it's weird that they used oo in Yoona and not Yuri because it's the exact same and I think Yoori might even make people tend more towards the correct pronunciation??? Yuri kind of makes me tend towards something like Yurr-i rather than Yu-ri.
so basically I have no idea what is even going on or what anyone was thinking
That's kind of funny that girl!SHINee's names got muddled in translation though.