Revised Romanization of Korean (original) (raw)

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 symbols except very limited, often optional, use of the 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

In addition, there are Special Provisions for regular phonological rules that makes exceptions to transliteration. (See Korean language#Phonology)

Other rules and recommendations include:

The optional hyphen is used to disambiguate syllables, e.g., jeong-eum versus jeon-geum
Use of the hyphen is not necessary, but permitted, 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

The Revised Romanization is not expected to be adopted as official romanization of Korean family namess. For example, the common family name, Lee (이), would be I (Yi in McCune-Reischauer) in this new system. Given namess and commercial names are encouraged to change, but not necessary. All Korean textbooks complied with the new system by February 28, 2002.

External links

Official introductions
- Mirror site from Office of the President
List of syllables and Romanization: Wikisource