Revised Romanization of Korean
The Revised Romanization of Korean, released in 2000 to romanize the Korean language, is the South Korean official replacement for the 1984 McCune-Reischauer-like Romanization. The Revised Romanization has no non-alphabetic symbol, except very limited and often optional use of hyphen.It had been developing by the National Academy of the Korean Language since 1995 and was released on July 4, 2000, by the South Korean Ministry of Culture and Tourism, which explains the reduction of special characters was to eliminate difficulty of entering, or rather the ease of ignoring, diacritics on computers.
Unique features are:
- 어 and 으 are written with two vowel letters: eo and eu, respectively.
- Aspirated consonants (ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅍ, ㅊ) are without apostrophe (k, t, p, and ch). Their unaspirated counterparts (ㄱ, ㄷ, ㅂ, ㅈ) are written with letters that are voiced in English (g, d, b, and j). However, the unaspirated consonants are also written as k, t, and p when at the end of a word or when followed by a consonant, when they are pronounced as such in reality.
- ㅅ is always written as s, and never also as sh.
- ㄹ is r before a vowel, l before a consonant or at the end of a word. Double ㄹ is always ll
Other rules and recommendations include:
- Optional hyphen is used to disambiguate syllable, e.g., jeong-eum versus jeon-geum
- Hyphen use is not necessary, but allowed, in between syllables of given namess.
- Phonological exceptions don't apply to given names, transliterate as they are written in Hangul
- Syllables of Korean administrative units (such as do) are separated from the placename with a hyphen
- However, names for geographic features and artificial structures are connected to the placename
- Capitalize proper nouns
External links
See also: Romaja
