Talk:Revised Romanization of Korean

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What is an apostrophe as described in article? Goodralph 05:43, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Explained in article. --Menchi 05:55, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)

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From article:

Although the common English name George uses "eo" to represent a single sound.

Well, the first 'e' merely 'softens' the preceding 'g' and does not have a vowel value of its own; 'o' is the vowel sound, not 'eo'. I'll take it out, but I cannot think of any "eo" combination that actually represents a single sound. --Iceager 06:54, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

You are correct in that the "e" converts a "hard g" into a "soft g." I was just trying to make the point that the "eo" combination is not absolutely foreign to English, although I know from personal experience that non-Korean speakers do struggle with the monophthong.... BTW, the "eo" in "people" is another example of the two vowels together, though of course the pronunciation (이) is completely different from the 어 that we are talking about.... -Sewing - talk 15:38, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

No 'sh' Ever

I think this is a legitimate criticism, but not included in the Article. When ㅅ is followed by ㅣ,ㅕ,ㅑ,ㅛ,and ㅠ it becomes an 'sh' sound, but this doesn't ever get translated right. For example 신림, pronounced 'Shillim' is spelled as 'Sillim.' The funny part is they actually have the right pronunciation for the regular ㄴ+ㄹ case when the first ㄴ becomes an ㄹ sound, otherwise it would be 'Sinrim' with this system. I want to add this, but someone else can do so before me. I can also snap a photo of some signs where the inaccuracy has taken place here in signs in Seoul. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 211.47.122.89 (talk) 09:25, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

No one gonna add this? I think it should definitely go there, I also want to mention the confusion for words like 정앙 and 전강, they both become Jungang. Bluesoju (talk) 09:38, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

RP is more or less phonemic. Sh is not a phoneme in Korean. (The one exception I recall is either l or r for ㄹ.)

정앙 and 전강 are distinguished by hyphenation, but you're right, it's optional, and will get left out just like the breves and apostrophes in Wade-Giles. kwami (talk) 10:12, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Role of Hyphen

There's been a bit of an edit conflict in both the Hangul and Korean language articles over the role of the hyphen. The Korean govt. site is rather sloppy: it's to be used "to avoid ambiguity", but not further standardized. This is a subjective call, and so different people revert each other's use of hyphens in the articles. For example, I've seen 한국어 as both Hangug-eo and Han-gugeo, each claiming to be "official".

According the gov. site, when the Romanization is intended to be back-transliterated into Hangul, the hyphen is used to represent silent ieung (except at the beginning of a word, of course). Should we adopt this as the standard for Wikipedia transliterations, to avoid future disagreements? Should we maybe vote on this?

(Another difference between the two systems is that 한국 Hanguk would instead be Hangug, but that's another issue.) 66.27.205.12 19:57, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

By which system would it be Hangug? Certainly not by RR or MR. --Wikipeditor 06:09, 24 August 2005 (UTC)

Ah, you mean RR transliteration. I don't think I've ever seen a term in RR transliteration except for the examples in the MC's RR guidelines.—Wikipeditor

I don't think there's any need for a vote here. Wikipedia works by consensus, wherever possible. See Wikipedia:Survey policy. As for the basic issue, it seems to me that the arguments for Han-gugeo are the strongest, since in RR "ng" is ambiguous between ㄴㄱ and ㅇ. ... although in the end it doesn't matter that much. We're getting to a point where an MoS for Korea-related topics would come in handy.-- Visviva 03:18, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

Criticism for oe ?

Has there been no famous backlash for translated 외 to 'oe' ? That is probably the worst translation of the entire RR as the sound is somewhat similar sounding to 'wae'. I'm still shocked that so called linguistic experts released RR without having thorough opinions on some of the sounds, especially from Korean Americans. I don't see how anyone would agree that 'oe' and 'eo' were good candidates for 외 and 어 respectively... you don't have to be an expert to figure that those are not very accurate matching sounds in english, yet the experts couldn't figure it out. Correct me if I'm wrong, but 넌(nun) would be translated to 'neon'? Which in English is pronounced Nee-on.

I remember being confused when I saw a Korean pitcher who's last name was spelled 'Seo" wondering what it was really suppose to be, as two syllable last names aren't very common (세오??)... only to find out it was 서 (Suh). -CKL —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.210.227.99 (talk) 07:46, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

POV?

After an anonymous user has given this article a POV tag, I take this opportunity to express my agreement. I think the article has been very unbalanced and does not do its subject justice. While I have hesitated to edit against what appeared to be a majority opinion, it seems I might not be the only one who thinks this article has contained more than a bit of emotional RR bashing. – Wikipeditor 12:49, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Just a note about the Revised Romanization

I've been a professional Korean to English translator for KBS, MBC, Vivendi, and other media companies for many years now and it is to my opinion that any attempt of romanization of Korean using a system of only 26 Alphabet characters with 44 phonemes is bound to be inadequate. However, Revised Romanization seems to have been created around the regular English Qwerty keyboard layout, which in turn, is more apt for Internet--for the usage of the masses. As someone else has already commented above, McCune-Reischauer and Yale system could be used for more technical linguists who are more concerned about being exact using inexact tools.

I've been using R.R. for many of dramas and movies I translate for last 2 years now and I haven't received any complaints about it. But many of other translators I know aren't even aware of R.R. yet. When I do introduce it, they've been pushing it away for now. It seems like only technical few like myself are willing to take a serious look at this and take the risk to change it. I think this makes more sense than McCune-Reischauer system when it comes to romanizing Korean for Internet and the mass-media.

Hanguk vs. Hangug and other issues are really non-issues when you consider the fact that most of vowels ("a" and "u" in this case) are pronounced without understanding basic rules by a neophyte. From my POV, the pronunciation of "g" or "k" in Hangug and Hanguk makes such a slight difference compare to the pronunciation of vowels by a neophyte that any discussion involving such matters deserve a tautological DoS. Of course, no one would prefer that we start writing Haangook, but we do need to deal with some bigger issues here and stop griping about such trivial matters.

And yes, most of so-called standards this Korean and many previous administrations have proposed have been sloppy. So it's not any news we're dealing with here. I think the populous would prefer that we just create a detail Wiki-standard for Korean Romanization and have the rest follow slowly. We can even use my connections in media industry to start lobbying the Korean gov't for the second draft. Shall we start with Haan-gook-uh?

Another angle to this discussion is the fact that Korean is very easy to read. Most of English-speaking people I've taught in last 10 years have been able to read most of Korean language in less than 6 hours of lesson time. It's that easy to learn. Some students were able to master reading it less than 3 hours. So, if someone's really serious about going to Korea and they care to know little bit of its language, I think it's much faster to just learn how to read Korean instead of learning the Romanization system. I hypothesize that this may be the reason why there hasn't been any major revisions for such a long time, despite the fact it's been commonly used without any vowel points. But since we're discussing this R.R., I'd only say that this is more for the mass usage rather than technical. --clayjar (talk) 21:07, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

More neutral revision needed

I think we need to quickly revise the article for more neutrality by simply presenting what Revised Romanization that Korean gov't has proposed is, and then move some controversial issues pointed out by the previous editors under the subsection called Controversy or alike. But I'd prefer to get some of your inputs first. --xclay 13:17, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

I added a Criticism header and moved the first long, critical paragraph to below the Features and Usage sections. IMO that improves the overall tone of the article but some more defenses to the critisisms would make it more npov.--JackSeoul 02:17, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

The purpose of RR is misunderstood by most.

Somewhere in the article it should be pointed out that the main purpose of the system is so that FLUENT user of KOREAN can seamlessly go back and forth between ROMAJI and HANGUL - also so that you can type away on an ENGLISH keyboard, and have the IME easily change this to the correct HANGUL.

This is the way it works with Japanese (albeit with some very minor exceptions - easily overcome).

The drawback is that the resulting ROMAJI version of Korean is nearly useless as a pronunciation guide for non-native speakers of Korean.

In my case I am fluent in Japanese, but my in-laws are Korean - it took me some time to figure out why Romanization of Korean was so messed up compared to Japanese.

Japanese has only 5 vowels (plus long and short versions of them) so it's easy to use non-accented English to represent Japanese.

Koreans should have adopted a larger character set - perhaps a combo of French and Swedish characters - to more accurately be able to BOTH go back and forth between ROMAJI and HANGUL as well as to give beginners and visitors an idea of how Korean words are actually pronounced.

The current RR system is doomed to only work for those already fluent in Korean - which really is sad, since Romanization is supposed to benefit non-native users of the language. That's why Reischauer came up with his system of Romanization of Japanese in the first place - goofy as his first approach was.

One example "Choi" - this is NOT pronounced anywhere near the way it is Romanized - it's actually "Ché"... "Park" is really "Pak" and "Lee" is really "Ii" and...

It's messed up - doomed to remain that way - get used to it. Learn to read Hangul!Thomas (talk) 17:46, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Spelling

To §: I think both Rs should be R, not r. It's a name, after all. – Wikipeditor

I agree. The Korean government officially capitalizes both Rs, so the official title is "Revised Romanization..." --Akira123323 09:55, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Misspellings abound in Korean government publications, we must not turn to them for guidance. – Wikipeditor

Transliteration vs. Transcription

Let us not neglect the differences between a transliteration (or romanization) and a (phonetic/phonemic) transcription. If there is any need of a revised romanization, it should be 100% straightforward and ignore any and all pronunciation peculiarities. Whereby 듦 would be x-litʼd (transliterated) as "dŭlm", since ㄷ = "d", ㅡ = "ŭ", ㄹ = "l" or "r", and ㅁ = "m". That would be its x-litʼn. It would, of course, be different from its transcription/pronunciation but it would be an accurate romanization. This way if one were given the syllable "dŭlm" to x-lit into Hangul there would be no doubt as to what each element stood for. I have devised and continuously use this system since it is essentially foolproof. I think that all transliteration systems ought to be reciprocal and have a 1-to-1 graphemic correspondence. As I aforestated, this wouldn't necessarily correspond to the pronunciation of the word, &c., but it would allow for interchangability and leave no room for ambiguity. The need for such elemental accuracy is attested in x-litʼns of such arcane writing systems as Egyptian hieroglyphics, which rendered its words almost unpronounceable unless gratuitously laden with e vowels (a vowel which has eluded many writing systems throughout history) to "aid/assist pronunciation". Who the hell would recognise "KISRS" as representing the name "Caesar"? Well, Champollion, for one. Aye, those were the days… At any rate, we mustnʼt confuse romanizations with pronunciations. McCune-Reischauer, &c., are good systems when it comes to traditional romanization. And by "traditional" I mean transliteration which is designed to be pronounced as it is written. But, IMNSHO, there should be two systems at work here; viz 1.) transliteration for reading/writing and 2.) transcription for listening/speaking.—Strabismus 01:39, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

An official transliteration system already exists within RR: [1] (bottom). Not to mention Yale.—Wikipeditor 10:35, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Discussion with-out illustration!

This article does not have a table showing how EACH Korean letter gets transcribed. There is discussion and comparison (narrative, not tabular) to RM. Please, some-body put a table in. One of the main uses of an encyclopedia is to be a quick, user-friendly how-to source. (Links that might or might not be usable are no substitute.)
—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Kdammers (talk • contribs) 2006-01-25

A table has been deleted from (at least the Korean) WP to avoid possible copyright infringement. This page lacks any copyright notice, but I doubt this means we can just copy parts of it. I don't know to what extent copyright applies to official publications of South Korea in general and to romanisation schemes intended for general use and/or tables illustrating their use in particular. Outbound links are probably better than nothing. We also still have Korean romanization#Examples as sort of a quick reference, which does not show romanisations for each letter either. Wikipeditor 09:25, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Automated conversion?

Anybody have a link to a decent hangul<->RR<->hangul converter? The best I've found is this but it doesn't do syllable endings properly. Jpatokal 02:06, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

Have a look at Wikipedia:Korea-related topics notice board#Utility pages and keep in mind that automatic conversion programs will never be perfect, as there are a few ambiguities (kk may represent -[vowel]ㄲ-, -ㄲㅇ-, -ㄱㅋ-, -ㄲㅋ- or -ㅋㅋ-) inherent in the RR rules, as well as badly documented grey areas. Wikipeditor

Moved comments

These comments are from a stray version of this talk page. --Kjoonlee 08:53, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

Add English and Chinese characters to all examples

Also, "encouraged to change, but not necessary.": bad English. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.201.31.246 (talk • contribs)

Add English and Chinese characters to all examples

Also, "encouraged to change, but not necessary.": bad English. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.200.105.226 (talk • contribs)

Requested move

Talk:Revised romanization of Korean → Talk:Revised Romanization of Korean – To match capitalization of article --Kjoonlee 09:02, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

Survey

Add "* Support" or "* Oppose" followed by an optional one-sentence explanation, then sign your opinion with ~~~~

Discussion

• The request was speedied. --Dijxtra 10:22, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

Messy sentences

Hi, I'm not korean, and try to understand this page. And I wonder what is ment by the two following sentences:

"In proper names, only the initial consonants were usually affected. This because it is at the beginning of a term that searching for a domain name would typically go awry."

1. What is a "proper name"? 2. What is a "domain name? 2. What does "awry" mean?

Another thing, "this because it is" should probably be written "this is because it is" to make it grammatically correct. But the whole sentence probably needs to be rewritten instead.

List please!

Can anyone please put down a list of transliteration between Hangul and English for this system? Similar to the one in McCune-R. Thanks! --Edmundkh 16:18, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Wikitravel phrasebook needs help

A cry for help: Wikitravel has a fairly comprehensive phrasebook for Korean, but the transscriptions are currently all over the place with completely off-the-wall stuff like "han-goo-gǒ-reul" (!?!) for 한국어를. If you can pitch in even 5 minutes and help fix it up into consistent Revised Romanization, the travellers of the world will be grateful. Jpatokal 11:54, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Request

The Korean language really needs a better and more accurately revised romanization, like the Japanese romaji and the Chinese revised romanization. Here are a few suggestions to the new revised romanization de Coree:

• 착 = Chak
• 찬 = Chan
• 찯 = Chad(t)
• 찰 = Chal
• 참 = Cham
• 찹 = Chab(p)
• 찻 = Chat(s)
• 창 = Chang
• 찾 = Chat(j/z)
• 찿(!) = Chat(ch(t))
• 챀(!) = Chak(t)
• 챁 = Chat
• 챂(!) Chap(t)
• 챃(!) Chah(t)
• ㅕ = yu
• ㅓ = u
• ㅑ = ya
• ㅛ = yo
• ㅠ = yoo

I am asking the permission to create another page for the New Revised Romanization of Korean. Thank you. Polleo

Do you mean that you want to create a page filled with examples? (Wikimachine 02:08, 5 July 2007 (UTC))

Korean is not Japanese...? Japanese doesn't have changing sounds based on word position. Are you asking to create an entire page with every possible character? That's prett crazy, although it would make transliteration more concise, I suppose. Just unwieldly. 65.189.170.90 05:48, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

Japanese DOES have changing sounds based on word position - all the time! That's the typical purpose of daku-on - (e.g. ha/pa/ba, sa/ja).Thomas (talk) 17:27, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Well in my opinion, some of your suggestions are inaccurate as well. 찯 = Chad(t) ---> should be Chat

챀(!) = Chak(t) --> Why the (t) ? ㅋ is not in any way related to a t sound

찾 = Chat(j/z) --> There is no z sound in Korean. If i'm not mistaken, J/Z aren't really related in anyway on a linguistic chart either.

챃(!) Chah(t) --> Chat (you can't end in a 'h' sound) etc etc

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you are trying to do? - CKL

transcription vs. transliteration?

Does RR contain two subsystems, transcription and transliteration? That's what I'm getting from the refs, but I don't read Korean. That is, is there an option of writing 백마 as unhyphenated Baengma or as hyphenated Baek-ma? If so, we should dedicate a section to it; if not, there are several transcription errors in the article. This is relevant at hangul, where we're reverting back and forth between ahaekkeul and ahaetgeul for 아햇글.kwami (talk) 08:35, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Don't tell anyone I told you, but speaking from memory, I think there might be a mention of that in the official docs. (I vaguely remember seeing it, but I'm not sure.) Nonetheless, I've seen super-duper-serious-transliteration mode in use in academic (linguistic) journals, where 아햇글 would be written as a haes geul or something like that.

But other than that, normal usage in subway signs is definitely transcription, not transliteration. --Kjoonlee 15:33, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Usage in wikipedia

The Revised Romanization of the Korean language in common in/on Wikipedia. While Englisg (From the united kingdom of great-britain and northern ireland) and not south korea, Why does wikipedia use Revised Romanization instead of the more efficient Mccune-Reischauer.--82.134.154.25 (talk) 14:53, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

morphophonemic usage

Could we expand on morphophonemic transcription/transliteration? There's someone at Korean grammar reverting everything to phonetic, using this article as evidence, and thus obscuring the very things illustrated there. kwami (talk) 08:08, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

Consonant letters

ㄱ	ㄲ	ㅋ	ㄷ	ㄸ	ㅌ	ㅂ	ㅃ	ㅍ
g, k	gg, kk	k	d, t	dd, tt	t	b, p	bb, pp	p
ㅈ	ㅉ	ㅊ	ㅅ	ㅆ	ㅎ	ㄴ	ㅁ	ㅇ	ㄹ
j	jj	ch	s	ss	h	n	m	ng	r, l

This is the way the article reads at the moment. The Roman "g, k" for the first cell "ㄱ" does suggest that the first "g" stands for the initial or first consonant while the last "k" for the last of a Korean syllabary. Then it should follow that the pairs "dd, tt" and "bb, pp" respectively for the Korean letters "ㄸ" and "ㅃ" should stand for the first and the last consonants, respectively. Unfortunately, however, those "ㄸ" and "ㅃ" are NEVER used for the last consonant. So I have to take it seriously if this chart makes any serious sense. May I dare to suggest one more thing? The current content of the article is too poor to be of any practical, if not authoritative, help as regards the problematic romanization of the Korean language, I fear. --KYPark (talk) 09:36, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

romanization of film title "악마를 보았다"

Could someone please check the romanization of this film title? Is this really according to RR? Except for Rotten Tomatoes (see the URL line here), everyone else (including IMDb) seems to be using a different version, namely this one: Akmareul boatda. So, which romanization is correct, and if both are, which one is preferable, and why? Thanks for your help – ὁ οἶστρος (talk) 19:31, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

verification / references needed for some sections of the criticisms section

General lack of objectivity in some of the criticisms forwarded here (example below) Observed that many articles in the wiki korea project, present article included, tend to be written anecdotally or marred by political agendas, bias or plain ignorance.

"Despite governmental promotion, the revised system met with considerable opposition among foreign residents in South Korea, many of whom felt the revised system contained serious flaws and felt that the government failed to consult with them beforehand, they being the primary users of Romanized Korean inside South Korea."

- first off no citations. - dubious word choices "considerable opposition among foreign residents"
+ from what I recall a few years back the majority of the opposition came from non-Korean speaking white anglophones while many Korean-Americans actually supported the change.
+ last I checked the opposition group in question constitutes less than 5% of the "foreign" population of the country and less than 25% of the English speaking foreigners here (majority being foreigners of Korean descent)

• point here is to write clearly, objectively and according to the standards set out in this project.
  
• contributing to an article is more than passing anecdotes at some sketch bar in Itaewon.