Revised Romanization of Korean

The Revised Romanization of Korean is the official Korean language romanization system in South Korea. The system was released by South Korean authorities in 2000 and is the South Korean official replacement for the 1984 McCune-Reischauer–based romanization system. The new system is similar to the system used before 1984, except that the old system did not faithfully represent consonants because their pronunciation changes (according to non-Korean sensibility) depending on position within a word.

Related Topics:
Korean language - Romanization - South Korea - 2000 - 1984 - McCune-Reischauer

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The Revised Romanization uses no non-alphabetic symbols (diacritics) except very limited, often optional, use of the hyphen. It was developed by the National Academy of the Korean Language starting in 1995 and was released to the public on July 4, 2000, by South Korea's Ministry of Culture and Tourism, which explained that the reason for the reduction of special characters was to eliminate difficulty of entering, or rather the ease of ignoring, diacritics on computers and — more importantly — rationalize Korean language with the plain ASCII text of internet domain names.

Related Topics:
Alphabet - Diacritic - Hyphen - 1995 - July 4 - 2000 - Computer

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Despite the South Korean government's intentions to rationalize the Romanization of Korean words and place names, the release of the revised system met with considerable opposition among international residents in Korea, many of whom felt the revised system was seriously flawed and felt disgruntled that the government failed to consult with them beforehand, since they are the primary users of Romanized Korean inside South Korea. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism responded that the primary purpose of the new system was not for the sake of foreigners and pointed out that foreign experts had been consulted, while admiting that the new system did in many cases fail to reflect correct pronunciation of Korean language. That task the 1984 M-R system had addressed well, but in so doing did not maintain a one-to-one correspondence between han-geul consonants and the Western (Latin) alphabet. Among the pronunciation problems, however, many if not most were dealt with satisfactorily from the perspective of pronunciation, through compromises in proper names (strict application of the new system for academic usage has serious pronunciation issues from the perspective of foreigners, but that problem is moot). In proper names (the only really problematic area) only the initial consonants were usually affected -- and this because it is at the beginning of a term that searching for a domain name would typically go awry. The MoCT pointed out that China, too, underwent a similar upheaval with the international community decades previous when the Beijing government enforced its own standardization (Note: Beijing used to be spelled "Peking").

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~