I submit that it is not meaningless to the extent that certain groups seem to stipulate a particular romanization and from the General Choi system perspective there was a reason for it. So, if a group that purports to follow General Choi's system uses something other than Tk-D at this pooint in time, they've screwed up. (in the early days all sorts of stuff was out there.)
I am not a Kukki scholar and will defer to those who are. Somewhere in the cobwebs of my brain I thought I read that the designated romanization of KKW was Tkd and that they had a reason for it. I read it on the internet so it must be true
Well, I have never seen any sort of stipulation in the KKW textbook, but Tkd would make sense, given that taekwondo is one word. But that wasn't what I was getting at.
There are literally no fewer than fifty taekwondo schools in Montgomery County, and I'm pretty sure that none of them are ITF. The only one that I know of that claimed to be of ITF lineage is Kang's Black Belt Academy, but when I directed someone there who was asking about ITF schools in Montgomery County, he went and said that they are not ITF, but WTF. I talked to the owner, and got the impression that they are independent.
Anyway, of all of these non ITF schools, there is no consistency as to how they write taekwondo on their signage. I have, in the state of Maryland, seen all of the following:
- Taekwondo
- Taekwon Do
- Taekwon-Do
- Tae Kwon Do
- Tae-Kwon-Do
- TKD
- Tkd
- T.K.D.
- TK-D
- T-K-D
So, from that signage, according to yourself and other ITF-ers, the second and third should be indicators that those are ITF schools, but they are not. None of them are ITF. But all of them are indicative of how westerners Romanize Asian words.
My point wasn't that some ITF schools may have "screwed up," but that since the ITF schools are not the only ones writing it that way and since they are in the minority as far as percentage of TKD schools go, it is meaningless with regards to differentiating an ITF school from a non-ITF school.
