The Revised Romanization of Korean (국어의 로마자 표기법; lit. Roman letter notation of national language) is the official Korean language romanization system in South Korea proclaimed by Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, replacing the older McCune–Reischauer system. The new system eliminates diacritics in favour of digraphs and adheres more closely to Korean phonology than to a suggestive rendition of Korean phonetics for non-native speakers.

The Revised Romanization limits itself to only the English alphabet (apart from limited, often optional use of the hyphen). It was developed by the National Academy of the Korean Language from 1995 and was released to the public on July 7, 2000, by South Korea's Ministry of Culture and Tourism in Proclamation No. 2000-8. The proclamation cites the following reasons for the new system:^[1]

• It promotes consistent romanization by native Korean speakers by better transcribing important language characteristics.
• It reduces the confusion caused by frequent omission of apostrophes and diacritics.
• It rationalizes the Korean language with the plain ASCII text of internet domain names.

Features[link]

Notable features of the Revised Romanization system are as follows:

• 어 and 으 are written as digraphs with two vowel letters: eo and eu, respectively (replacing the ŏ and ŭ of the McCune-Reischauer system).
  • However, ㅝ is written as wo and ㅢ is written as ui.
• Unlike McCune-Reischauer, aspirated consonants (ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅍ, ㅊ) have no apostrophe: k, t, p, ch. Their unaspirated counterparts (ㄱ, ㄷ, ㅂ, ㅈ) are written with letters that are voiced in English: g, d, b, j. However, all consonants that are pronounced as unreleased stops (which basically means all except ㄴ, ㄹ, ㅁ, ㅇ that are not followed by a vowel or semivowel) are written as k, t, p, with no regard to their morphophonemic value: 벽 → byeok, 밖 → bak, 부엌 → bueok (But: 벽에 → byeoge, 밖에 → bakke, 부엌에 → bueoke)
• ㅅ is always written as s before vowels and semivowels; there is no sh except when transliterating.
• ㄹ is r before a vowel or a semivowel, and l everywhere else: 리을 → rieul, 철원 → Cheorwon, 울릉도 → Ulleungdo, 발해 → Balhae. Just like in McCune-Reischauer, ㄴ is written l whenever pronounced as a lateral rather than as a nasal consonant: 전라북도 → Jeollabuk-do

In addition, it contains special provisions for regular phonological rules that makes exceptions to transliteration (see Korean language#Phonology).

Other rules and recommendations include the following:

• A hyphen may optionally disambiguate syllables: 가을 → ga-eul (fall; autumn) versus 개울 → gae-ul (stream). However, few official publications make use of this provision, since actual instances of ambiguity among names are rare.
  • A hyphen must be used in linguistic transliterations, where it denotes syllable-initial ㅇ (except at the beginning of a word): 없었습니다 → eobs-eoss-seubnida, 외국어 → oegug-eo, 애오개 → Ae-ogae
• It is permitted to hyphenate syllables in the given name, following common practice. Certain phonological changes, ordinarily indicated in other contexts, are ignored in names, to better disambiguate between names: 강홍립 → Gang Hongrip or Gang Hong-rip, 한복남 → Han Boknam or Han Bok-nam
• Administrative units (such as the do) are hyphenated from the placename proper: 강원도 → Gangwon-do
  • One may omit terms “such as 시, 군, 읍”: 평창군 → Pyeongchang-gun or Pyeongchang, 평창읍 → Pyeongchang-eup or Pyeongchang.
• However, names for geographic features and artificial structures are not hyphenated: 설악산 → Seoraksan, 해인사 → Haeinsa
• Capitalize proper nouns.

Usage[link]

Similarly to several European languages that have undergone spelling simplifications (such as Portuguese, German or Swedish), the Revised Romanization is not expected to be adopted as the official romanization of Korean family names. For example, the common family name, Lee (이), would be "I" in both the Revised Romanization and McCune-Reischauer. Given names and commercial names are encouraged to change, but it is not required. All Korean textbooks were required to comply with the new system by February 28, 2002. English-language newspapers in South Korea initially resisted the new system, citing its flaws, though all later gave in to government pressure. The Korea Times was the last major English newspaper, which switched in May 2006 to the Revised Romanization.

North Korea continues to use a version of the McCune-Reischauer system of Romanization, which was in official use in South Korea from 1984 to 2000.

Transcription rules[link]

Vowel letters[link]

Consonant letters[link]

The revised romanization transcribes certain phonetic changes that occur with combinations of the final consonant of one character and the initial consonant of the next, for example Hanguk → Hangug-eo. The significant changes are highlighted:

Criticism[link]

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2007)

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.^{[citation needed]}

Critics of the Revised Romanization System say that the one-to-one correspondence of Korean characters to Roman letters (e.g., usually representing ㄱ as g) that is the hallmark of the new system is overly simplistic and fails to represent sound changes that occur naturally when the position of a consonant changes^{[citation needed]} (e.g., at the beginning of a word, ㄱ is pronounced closer to an unaspirated k, rather than as a straight g). A frequent complaint of many foreign residents and visitors to South Korea is that both Romanization systems hinder accurate and comprehensible rendering of Korean pronunciation.

Critics also complain that digraphs such as eo and eu, denoting sounds that differ from conventional European use, confuse those unfamiliar with the language. In English, for instance, eo as found in geography, Leonardo, or neon represents a sequence of two vowels, not the Korean monophthong. Defenders of the system cite English words such as surgeon as evidence of the appropriateness of the combination, even though the sound is not an exact match (the e has the role of softening the g to a j-sound, and is not actually part of the vowel). Other supporters point out that it is a system intended to transliterate into the Roman alphabet, not English. However, other languages with a large inventory of distinct vowel phonemes similar to Korean (such as Turkish, Hungarian, or Swedish) resort to diacritics, with the exception of English, with its notoriously cumbersome orthography. German, for example, usually writes ae, oe, and ue as ä, ö, and ü, with the umlaut originating as a tiny "e" written above the vowel, and only uses digraphs when umlauts are unavailable, or in certain names (such as Goethe). Also, a digraph, namely eu, is used to represent a very short vowel that is often used as an epenthetic vowel for borrowings from English and other languages, leading to situations where the cluster str-, for example, ends up being written as seuteur-.

One motivation for the digraph "eo" appears to be an analogy with the conventional romanization "Seoul" of the South Korean capital. This romanization derives from an old French romanization Séoul in which the two syllables of this name denote "sé" and "oul", reflecting French orthography. The revised romanization instead treats this as a combination of "seo" and "ul", since u normally renders the second vowel (in accord with North European orthography).

The Ministry of Culture & Tourism says that the change was necessary because the McCune-Reischauer system did not adequately reflect important characteristics of the Korean language, making it difficult for native Korean speakers to use. For example, "The difference between some voiced and non-voiced sounds are in Korean little more than allophones, but [the] old system transcribed these as entirely different phonemes."^[1]

This, however, does not explain why the already existing Yale Romanization was not adopted by the Korean government instead.

Despite criticism by foreigners accustomed to using McCune Reischauer, often people who do not know Korean, many foreign residents and scholars have found the new system simple and logical. While all Romanization schema may be akin to learning a new language, the NGR (New Government Romanization) is applied much more easily after short study. In the past the majority of non-Korean fluent users of Romanization did not understand the purpose of diacritics, hence often omitting them and confusing everyone else.

See also[link]

• Romaja
• List of Korea-related topics

References[link]

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2008)

External links[link]

Look up revised romanization of korean in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Romanization of Korean from the National Institute of Korean Language
• Online Revised Romanization Input Method Editor
• software online: lexilogos words' converter Hangeul > Latin alphabet

Korean romanization is a system for representing the Korean language using the Latin AKA Roman script. In Korea, the Korean language is written using hangul, and sometimes hanja.

Romaja literally means Roman letters in Korean, and refers to the Latin script. "Romaja" is not to be confused with "romanization". The former can be applied to any use of the Latin script in Korean text—whether for Korean or non-Korean words or names—while the latter refers to writing Korean words using the Latin script: either romanizing individual words in a Korean text, or writing an entire Korean text in the Latin script.

Systems[link]

Many romanization schemes are in common use:

• McCune-Reischauer (MR; 1937?), the first transcription to gain some acceptance. A slightly modified version of MR was the official system for Korean in South Korea from 1984 to 2000, and yet a different modification is still the official system in North Korea. MR uses breves, apostrophes 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 ’.^[1]
• Yale (1942): This system has become the established standard romanization for Korean among linguists. Vowel length in old or dialectal pronunciation is indicated by a macron. In cases that would otherwise be ambiguous, orthographic syllable boundaries are indicated with a period. Indicates disappearance of consonants.
• Revised Romanization of Korean (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.^{[citation needed]} 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 hyphen, although state institutions never seem to make use of this option, e.g. on street signs or linemaps.^{[citation needed]}

• ISO/TR 11941 (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: [1]
• Lukoff romanization, developed 1945–47 for his Spoken Korean coursebooks^[2]
• Chosŏn Sahoe Kwahagwŏn (Hangul: 조선민주주의인민공화국사회과학원, Hanja: 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), 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.

Examples[link]

See also[link]

• Cyrillization of Korean
• List of Korea-related topics

Notes[link]

1. ^ "ALA-LC Romanization Tables". http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization/korean.pdf. 
2. ^ "Korean Romanization Reference". http://www.glossika.com/en/dict/korpin.html. 

External links[link]

• 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

Seongha Jeong (정성하) (colloquially: Sungha Jung) (born 2 September 1996) is a South Korean professional acoustic finger-style guitarist who has risen to fame on YouTube and other sites. As of 2012, his channel had over 17 million views, with his videos getting a total of over 454 million views, and also over 726,000 subscribers.^[1]

Seongha typically takes three days to learn and practice a new piece, and video-record it for upload onto YouTube.^[2] His genre selection is rather broad, as he learns and plays many pieces that are playable on guitar, therefore consequently spread across numerous genres.

Seongha has won 13 awards on YouTube, including 6 "#1" awards. Also on YouTube, Seongha has 523 videos with over one million views. Seongha's video with the most views is the one which shows him playing the theme from "Pirates Of The Caribbean".

In 2010, he was featured on Narsha's solo album "Narsha" for the song "I'm in Love" Seongha has composed 18 pieces as of February 2011, two of which are featured in his debut album, "Perfect Blue". He released his second album, "Irony", on 21 September 2011.

In 2011, he performed in the US with Trace Bundy, as well as touring in Scandinavia and Japan.^[1]

See also[link]

• Yuto Miyazawa, Seongha's Japanese electric guitar-playing counterpart
• Trace Bundy, Fellow acoustic guitarist with whom Seongha collaborates
• Ulli Bögershausen, Fellow acoustic guitarist who helped him get his sponsorship with Lakewood Guitars

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official website

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (February 2011)

Kim Ha-neul
Kim Ha-neul at the LG Xnote Michael Kors collaboration party, on March 2010
Born	(1978-02-21) 21 February 1978 (age 34) Seoul, South Korea
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1998–present
Agent	J One Plus Entertainment
Korean name
Hangul	김하늘
Hanja	金荷娜
Revised Romanization	Gim Ha-Neul
McCune–Reischauer	Kim Ha-Nŭl
Website
http://www.joneplus.co.kr/kimhaneul

Kim Ha-neul (Hangul: 김하늘) (born February 21, 1978) is a South Korean actress. Her given name "Ha-neul" is the Korean word for "sky". She is managed by J One Plus Entertainment.^[1] She has received numerous awards including Best Actress at the 2004 Baeksang Arts Awards and most recently the award for Best Actress at the 48th Grand Bell Awards in 2011.^[2] She studied cinema in Seoul Institute of Arts.

Biography[link]

In 2012, Kim returned to the small scene as Song Yi-soo, a high school ethics teacher, in SBS weekend drama A Gentleman's Dignity with Jang Dong-gun, Kim Min-jong, Kim Soo-ro, Lee Jong-hyuk and Lee Jong Hyun of CN Blue.^[3]

Filmography[link]

Film[link]

TV dramas[link]

Awards[link]

Endorsements[link]

• 2008 - Clio (Cosmetics), Designer Jeans (Taverniti So, Miss Me, and Mek Denim)
• 2007 - LG Curair (Shampoo)
• 2004 - 002 (Telecom), Uni (Property agency), Mouth Rinsing Fluid, Old&New (Fashion)(with Bae Yong Joon)
• 2003 - A-noni (Fruit Juice), Old&New (Fashion)(with Bae Yong Joon), Blupepe (Fashion: Spring season)
• 2002 - Blupepe (Fashion: Autumn&Winter season), Old & New (with Bae Yong Joon)
• 2001 - Juliet Gold (Jewelry)(with Go Soo), Green Tea, Lotte (Coffee)(with Jo In Sung), Vatang (Cosmetics), NORTON(Fashion), CLRIDE (Fashion)
• 2000 - Julia Domestic, SI, Veople, Clride, Noton (Furniture)(with Yoo Ji Tae), LOTTE (Chewing gum), Rosehill (Cosmetics)
• 1999 - LG 109, Motorola MP-9000, MAX Coffee, SI, Paul Wheeler (Fashion)
• 1998 - STORM (Fashion)

References[link]

External links[link]

• Kim Ha-neul official homepage (Korean)

This article about a Korean actor or actress is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Kim Ah-joong (also Kim Ah-Jung or Kim A-joong; born October 16, 1982, in Seoul, South Korea), is a South Korean film and drama actress/model. She graduated from Dongduk Women's University and attended Korea University and the International Hotel Management Institute Switzerland.^[1] She is best known for playing the main character in the 2006 critically acclaimed romance comedy 200 Pounds Beauty.

Career[link]

Kim Ah-joong is a well-known Korean actress/model/singer who rose to stardom from her roles in numerous films and commercials. She is best known for her role as a large girl (Han-na) who undergoes cosmetic surgery makeover to become a pop sensation in the highly successful 2006 South Korean comedy movie 200 Pounds Beauty. For this role, she was awarded Best Actress in the 2007 Grand Bell Awards.^[2] She did her own singing in the movie, including "Beautiful Girl' in the opening credits music and the song 'Maria'.

Prior to that, she appeared in a few other TV series including the popular Bizarre Bunch in 2005 by KBS.

Kim also is one of the most featured models in South Korean advertisements.

Filmography[link]

Film[link]

Drama[link]

TV Shows[link]

Music videos[link]

• 여자라서 하지 못한 말 - Youme

Awards[link]

Won[link]

See also[link]

• List of Koreans
• Contemporary culture of South Korea
• Korean wave

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official site (Korean)
• KimAhJoong.net (unofficial fansite)
• Ah-jung Kim at the Internet Movie Database