Korean romanization
Encyclopedia
Korean romanization is a system for representing the Korean language
using the Roman alphabet. In Korea
, the Korean language is written using hangul
, and sometimes hanja
.
Romaja literally means Roman letters in Korean
, and refers to the Roman alphabet. "Romaja" is not to be confused with "romanization
". The former can be applied to any use of the Roman alphabet in Korean text—whether for Korean or non-Korean words or names—while the latter refers to writing Korean words using the Roman alphabet: either romanizing individual words in a Korean text, or writing an entire Korean text in the Roman alphabet.
schemes are in common use:
McCune-Reischauer-based transcriptions and the Revised Romanization differ from each other mainly in the choice of how to represent certain hangul letters. Both attempt to match a word's spelling to how it would be written if it were an English word, so that an English speaker would come as close as possible to its Korean pronunciation by pronouncing it naturally. Hence, the same hangul letter may be represented by different Roman letters, depending on its pronunciation in context. The Yale system, on the other hand, represents each Korean letter by always the same Roman letter(s) context-independently, thus not indicating the hangul letters' context-specific pronunciation.
Even in texts that claim to follow one of the above, aberrations are a common occurrence and a major obstacle, e.g. when conducting an automated search on the Internet, as the searcher must check all possible spelling variants, a considerable list even without such aberrations.
In addition to these systems, many people spell names or other words in an ad hoc manner, producing more variations (e.g. 이/리 (李)
, which is variously romanized as Lee, Yi, I, or Rhee). For more details, see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Korean).
SKATS
is a transliteration system that does not attempt to use letters of a similar function in Western languages. A similar approach is to transliterate by hitting the keys that would produce a Korean word on a keyboard with 2[du]-beolsik layout. This can often be seen on the internet, for example in usernames
.
Korean language
Korean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...
using the Roman alphabet. In Korea
South Korea
The Republic of Korea , , is a sovereign state in East Asia, located on the southern portion of the Korean Peninsula. It is neighbored by the People's Republic of China to the west, Japan to the east, North Korea to the north, and the East China Sea and Republic of China to the south...
, the Korean language is written using hangul
Hangul
Hangul,Pronounced or ; Korean: 한글 Hangeul/Han'gŭl or 조선글 Chosŏn'gŭl/Joseongeul the Korean alphabet, is the native alphabet of the Korean language. It is a separate script from Hanja, the logographic Chinese characters which are also sometimes used to write Korean...
, and sometimes hanja
Hanja
Hanja is the Korean name for the Chinese characters hanzi. More specifically, it refers to those Chinese characters borrowed from Chinese and incorporated into the Korean language with Korean pronunciation...
.
Romaja literally means Roman letters in Korean
Korean language
Korean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...
, and refers to the Roman alphabet. "Romaja" is not to be confused with "romanization
Romanization
In linguistics, romanization or latinization is the representation of a written word or spoken speech with the Roman script, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system . Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written...
". The former can be applied to any use of the Roman alphabet in Korean text—whether for Korean or non-Korean words or names—while the latter refers to writing Korean words using the Roman alphabet: either romanizing individual words in a Korean text, or writing an entire Korean text in the Roman alphabet.
Systems
Many romanizationRomanization
In linguistics, romanization or latinization is the representation of a written word or spoken speech with the Roman script, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system . Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written...
schemes are in common use:
- McCune-ReischauerMcCune-ReischauerMcCune–Reischauer romanization is one of the two most widely used Korean language romanization systems, along with the Revised Romanization of Korean, which replaced McCune–Reischauer as the official romanization system in South Korea in 2000...
(MR; 1937?), the first transcription to gain some acceptance. A slightly modified version of MR was the official system for KoreanKorean languageKorean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...
in South KoreaSouth KoreaThe Republic of Korea , , is a sovereign state in East Asia, located on the southern portion of the Korean Peninsula. It is neighbored by the People's Republic of China to the west, Japan to the east, North Korea to the north, and the East China Sea and Republic of China to the south...
from 1984 to 2000, and yet a different modification is still the official system in North KoreaNorth KoreaThe Democratic People’s Republic of Korea , , is a country in East Asia, occupying the northern half of the Korean Peninsula. Its capital and largest city is Pyongyang. The Korean Demilitarized Zone serves as the buffer zone between North Korea and South Korea...
. MR uses breveBreveA breve is a diacritical mark ˘, shaped like the bottom half of a circle. It resembles the caron , but is rounded, while the caron has a sharp tip...
s, apostropheApostropheThe apostrophe is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritic mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet or certain other alphabets...
s and diereses, the latter two indicating orthographic syllable boundaries in cases that would otherwise be ambiguous.- Several variants of MR, often also called "McCune's and Reischauer's", differ from the original mostly in whether word endings are separated from the stem by a space, by a hyphen or not at all; and if a hyphen or space is used, whether sound change is reflected in a stem's last and an ending's first consonant letter (e.g. pur-i vs. pul-i). Although mostly irrelevant when transcribing uninflected words, these variants are so widespread that any mention of "McCune-Reischauer romanization" may not necessarily refer to the original system as published in the 1930s. MR-based romanizations have been common in popular literature until 2000.
- The ALA-LC / U.S. Library of Congress system is based on but deviates from MR. Unlike in MR, it addresses word division in seven pages of detail. Syllables of given names are always separated with a hyphen, which is expressly never done by MR. Sound changes are ignored more often than in MR. ALA-LC also distinguishes between ‘ and ’.
- Yale (1942): This system has become the established standard romanization for Korean among linguistsLinguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
. Vowel length in old or dialectal pronunciation is indicated by a macronMacronA macron, from the Greek , meaning "long", is a diacritic placed above a vowel . It was originally used to mark a long or heavy syllable in Greco-Roman metrics, but now marks a long vowel...
. In cases that would otherwise be ambiguous, orthographic syllable boundaries are indicated with a period. Indicates disappearance of consonants. - Revised Romanization of KoreanRevised Romanization of KoreanThe Revised Romanization of Korean is the official Korean language romanization system in South Korea proclaimed by Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, replacing the older McCune–Reischauer system...
(RR, also called South Korean or Ministry of Culture (MC) 2000): Includes rules both for transcription and for transliteration. South Korea now officially uses this system which was approved in 2000. Road signs and textbooks were required to follow these rules as soon as possible, at a cost estimated by the government to be at least US$20 million. Almost all road signs, names of railway and subway stations on line maps and signs etc. have been changed. Romanization of surnames and existing companies' names has been left untouched; the government encourages using the new system for given names and new companies.- RR is similar to MR, but uses neither diacritics nor apostrophes, which has helped it to gain widespread acceptance on the Internet. In cases of ambiguity, orthographic syllable boundaries may be indicated with a hyphenHyphenThe hyphen is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation. The hyphen should not be confused with dashes , which are longer and have different uses, or with the minus sign which is also longer...
, although state institutions never seem to make use of this option, e.g. on street signs or linemaps.
- RR is similar to MR, but uses neither diacritics nor apostrophes, which has helped it to gain widespread acceptance on the Internet. In cases of ambiguity, orthographic syllable boundaries may be indicated with a hyphen
- ISO/TR 11941ISO/TR 11941ISO/TR 11941:1996 is a Korean romanization system used in ISO. It is not commonly used; it is only used in Unicode character names.It is very similar to Yale Romanization.- Consonants :- Vowels :- Usage :...
(1996): This actually is two different standards under one name: one for North Korea (DPRK) and the other for South Korea (ROK). The initial submission to the ISO was based heavily on Yale and was a joint effort between both states, but they could not agree on the final draft. A superficial comparison between the two is available here: http://www.sori.org/hangul/romanizations.html#Roman_Intro - LukoffFred LukoffFred Lukoff was an American linguist who specialized in the study of the Korean language and was the first president of the International Association for Korean Language Education ....
romanization, developed 1945–47 for his Spoken Korean coursebooks - Chosŏn Sahoe Kwahagwŏn ({HangulHangulHangul,Pronounced or ; Korean: 한글 Hangeul/Han'gŭl or 조선글 Chosŏn'gŭl/Joseongeul the Korean alphabet, is the native alphabet of the Korean language. It is a separate script from Hanja, the logographic Chinese characters which are also sometimes used to write Korean...
: 조선민주주의인민공화국사회과학원, HanjaHanjaHanja is the Korean name for the Chinese characters hanzi. More specifically, it refers to those Chinese characters borrowed from Chinese and incorporated into the Korean language with Korean pronunciation...
: 朝鮮民主主義人民共和國社會科學院) romanization
McCune-Reischauer-based transcriptions and the Revised Romanization differ from each other mainly in the choice of how to represent certain hangul letters. Both attempt to match a word's spelling to how it would be written if it were an English word, so that an English speaker would come as close as possible to its Korean pronunciation by pronouncing it naturally. Hence, the same hangul letter may be represented by different Roman letters, depending on its pronunciation in context. The Yale system, on the other hand, represents each Korean letter by always the same Roman letter(s) context-independently, thus not indicating the hangul letters' context-specific pronunciation.
Even in texts that claim to follow one of the above, aberrations are a common occurrence and a major obstacle, e.g. when conducting an automated search on the Internet, as the searcher must check all possible spelling variants, a considerable list even without such aberrations.
In addition to these systems, many people spell names or other words in an ad hoc manner, producing more variations (e.g. 이/리 (李)
Lee (Korean name)
Lee is the common English spelling of 이 , a common Korean family name. The proper pronunciation in South Korea is like the English letter "E", although in North Korea the name is still written as "리" and pronounced "Lee". Many times South Koreans will knowingly introduce themselves as "Lee" to...
, which is variously romanized as Lee, Yi, I, or Rhee). For more details, see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Korean).
SKATS
SKATS
SKATS stands for Standard Korean Alphabet Transliteration System. It is also known as Korean morse equivalents. Despite the name, SKATS is not a true transliteration system. SKATS maps the hangul characters through Korean Morse code to the same codes in Morse code and back to their equivalents in...
is a transliteration system that does not attempt to use letters of a similar function in Western languages. A similar approach is to transliterate by hitting the keys that would produce a Korean word on a keyboard with 2[du]-beolsik layout. This can often be seen on the internet, for example in usernames
User (computing)
A user is an agent, either a human agent or software agent, who uses a computer or network service. A user often has a user account and is identified by a username , screen name , nickname , or handle, which is derived from the identical Citizen's Band radio term.Users are...
.
Examples
| English English language English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria... |
Hangul Hangul Hangul,Pronounced or ; Korean: 한글 Hangeul/Han'gŭl or 조선글 Chosŏn'gŭl/Joseongeul the Korean alphabet, is the native alphabet of the Korean language. It is a separate script from Hanja, the logographic Chinese characters which are also sometimes used to write Korean... (Hanja Hanja Hanja is the Korean name for the Chinese characters hanzi. More specifically, it refers to those Chinese characters borrowed from Chinese and incorporated into the Korean language with Korean pronunciation... ) |
RR Revised Romanization of Korean The Revised Romanization of Korean is the official Korean language romanization system in South Korea proclaimed by Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, replacing the older McCune–Reischauer system... (RR transcription in brackets) |
McC-Rsr McCune-Reischauer McCune–Reischauer romanization is one of the two most widely used Korean language romanization systems, along with the Revised Romanization of Korean, which replaced McCune–Reischauer as the official romanization system in South Korea in 2000... |
Yale | SKATS SKATS SKATS stands for Standard Korean Alphabet Transliteration System. It is also known as Korean morse equivalents. Despite the name, SKATS is not a true transliteration system. SKATS maps the hangul characters through Korean Morse code to the same codes in Morse code and back to their equivalents in... |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| “wall” | byeok (byeog) |
pyŏk | pyek | wsl | |
| “on the wall” | byeoge (byeog-e) |
pyŏge | pyek ey | wsl ktu | |
| “outside” (uninflected) |
bak (bakk) |
pak | pakk | well | |
| “outside” | bakke (bakk-e) |
pakke | pakk ey | well ktu | |
| “kitchen” | bueok (bueok) |
puŏk | puekh | wh ktx | |
| “to the kitchen/in the kitchen” | bueoke (bueok-e) |
puŏk'e | puekh ey | wh ktx ktu | |
| “Wikipedia Wikipedia Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,... ” |
wikibaekgwa (wikibaeggwa) |
wikibaekkwa | wikhi payk.kwa | khu xu weul lae | |
| “Hangul Hangul Hangul,Pronounced or ; Korean: 한글 Hangeul/Han'gŭl or 조선글 Chosŏn'gŭl/Joseongeul the Korean alphabet, is the native alphabet of the Korean language. It is a separate script from Hanja, the logographic Chinese characters which are also sometimes used to write Korean... ” |
hangeul or han-geul (hangeul) |
han'gŭl | hānkul | ||
| “character, letter” | geulja (geulja) |
kŭlcha | kulqca | ||
| “(an) easy” (+ noun) | swiun … (swiun …) |
shwiun … | swīwun … | ||
| “Korea has four distinct season Season A season is a division of the year, marked by changes in weather, ecology, and hours of daylight.Seasons result from the yearly revolution of the Earth around the Sun and the tilt of the Earth's axis relative to the plane of revolution... s.” |
Hangugeun ne gyejeori tturyeothada. (Hangug-eun ne gyejeol-i ttulyeoshada.) |
Hangugŭn ne kyejŏri tturyŏthada. | Hānguk un ne kyeycel i ttwulyes hata. | ||
| “Just check Check box In computing, a checkbox is a graphical user interface element that permits the user to make multiple selections from a number of options or to have the user answer yes or no on a simple yes/no question.Normally, checkboxes are shown on... the line color and width you want.” |
Wonhasineun seon saekkkalgwa gulkgie chekeuhasimyeon doemnida. (Wonhasineun seon saegkkalgwa gulggie chekeuhasimyeon doebnida.) |
Wŏnhasinŭn sŏn saekkalgwa kulkie ch'ek'ŭhasimyŏn toemnida. | Wēn hasinun sen sayk.kkal kwa kwulk.ki ey cheykhu hasimyen toypnita. |
External links
- Comparison tables of the different systems:
- Comparison table of ISO TR/11941, North Korean national system (1992), Revised Romanization, McCune-Reischauer, Yale (PDF file from UN Group of Experts on Geographical Names Working Group on Romanization Systems)
- Comparison table of IPA, Yale, McCune-Reischauer, Lukoff, South Korea Ministry of Education, Joseon Gwahagwon, Revised Romanization (PDF file from Glossika Inc.)
- Lukoff's system (simple table)
- Gangmun Romanization
- Online transliteration tool