Romanization

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See Romanization (cultural) for the spread of Roman culture, law and language.

In linguistics, romanization (or Latinization, also spelled romanisation or Latinisation) is the representation of a word or language with the Roman (Latin) alphabet, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system. Methods of romanization include transliteration, representing written text, and transcription, representing the spoken word. The latter can be subdivided into phonological transcription, which records the phonemes or units of semantic meaning in speech, and more strict phonetic transcription, which records speech sounds with precision. Each romanization has its own set of rules for pronunciation of the romanized words.

To romanize a body of text, is to transliterate or transcribe it from another writing system into the Roman alphabet. This process is most commonly associated with the Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages (CJK). Cyrillization is the similar process of representing a language using the Cyrillic alphabet.

Methods of Romanization

Transliteration

If the romanization attempts to transliterate the original script, the guiding principle is a one-to-one mapping of characters in the source language into the target script, with less emphasis on how the result sounds when pronounced according to the reader's language. For example, the Nihon-shiki romanization of Japanese allows the informed reader to reconstruct the original Japanese kana syllables with 100% accuracy, but is not readable without prior study.

Transcription

Phonological

However, most romanizations are intended for the casual reader, who is unfamiliar with the intricacies of the original script and is more interested in pronouncing the source language. Such romanizations follow the principle of phonological transcription and attempt to render the significant sounds (phonemes) of the original as faithfully as possible in the target language. The popular Hepburn romanization of Japanese is an example of a transcriptive romanization designed for English speakers.

Phonetic

A phonetic conversion goes one step further and attempts to depict all phones in the source language, sacrificing legibility if necessary by using characters or conventions not found in the target script. The International Phonetic Alphabet is the most common system of phonetic transcription.

Tradeoffs

For most language pairs, building a usable romanization involves tradeoffs between the two extremes. Pure transcriptions are generally not possible, as the source language usually contains sounds and distinctions not found in the target language, but which must be shown to for the romanized form to be comprehensible.

In general, outside a limited audience of scholars, romanizations tend to lean more towards transcription. As an example, consider the Japanese martial art 柔術: the Nihon-shiki romanization zyūzyutu may allow someone who knows Japanese to reconstruct the kana syllables じゅうじゅつ, but most people would find it easier to guess the pronunciation from the Hepburn version, jūjutsu.

Romanization of specific writing systems

Arabic

For more detail, see Arabic transliteration

The Arabic alphabet is used to write Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. Romanization standards include:

• Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (1936): [link] Adopted by the International Convention of Orientalist Scholars in Rome. It is the basis for the very influential Hans Wehr dictionary (ISBN 0879500034).
• BS 4280 (1968): Developed by the British Standards Institute [link]
• SATTS (1970s): Developed by US military
• UNGEGN (1972): [link]
• DIN-31635 (1982): Developed by the Deutsches Institut für Normung (German Institute for Standardization)
• ISO 233 (1984). Transliteration.
• Qalam (1985): A system that focuses upon preserving the spelling, rather than the pronunciation, and uses mixed case [link]
• ISO 233-2(1993). Simplified transliteration.
• Buckwalter Transliteration (1990s): Developed at Xerox by Tim Buckwalter [link]; doesn't require unusual diacritics [link]
• ALA-LC (1997): [link]
• Arabic Chat Alphabet

Hebrew

For more details, see Hebrew alphabet and Romanization of Hebrew.

• ANSI Z39.25 (1975):
• UNGEGN (1977): [link]
• ISO 259 (1984): Transliteration.
• ISO 259-2 (1994): Simplified transliteration.
• ISO/DIS 259-3: Phonemic transcription.
• ALA-LC: [link]

Brahmic scripts

The Brahmic family of abugidas is used for languages of the Indian subcontinent and south-east Asia. There is a long tradition in the west to study Sanskrit and other Indic texts in Latin transliteration. Various transliteration conventions have been used for Indic scripts since the time of Sir William Jones. A comparison of some of them is provided here: [link]

• ISO 15919 (2001): A standard transliteration convention was codified in the ISO 15919 standard. It uses diacritics to map the much larger set of Brahmic consonants and vowels to the Latin script. See also [Transliteration of Indic scripts: how to use ISO 15919]. The Devanagari-specific portion is identical to the academic standard, IAST: "International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration", and to the United States Library of Congress standard, ALA-LC: [link]
• Harvard-Kyoto: Uses upper and lower case and doubling of letters, to avoid the use of diacritics, and to restrict the range to 7-bit ASCII.
• ITRANS: a transliteration scheme into 7-bit ASCII created by Avinash Chopde that used to be prevalent on Usenet.
• ASTHA: "Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration for HTML", made in Argentina, also into 7-bit ASCII [link]
• ISCII (1988)
• National Library at Calcutta romanization (?)

See also: Romanization of Sanskrit, Romanization of Malayalam.

Chinese

Romanization of Chinese, in particular, has proved a very difficult problem, although the issue is further complicated by political considerations. Another complication is the fact that Mandarin is perceived to be written non-phonetically, and this myth has retarded acceptance of romanisation efforts. See [Chinese romanization] for further info. Because of this, many romanization tables contain Chinese characters plus one or more romanizations or Zhuyin. See also: [link] [link]

• ALA-LC: Used to be similar to Wade-Giles [link], but converted to Hanyu Pinyin since 2000 [link]
• EFEO. Developed by Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient in 19th century, used mainly in France.
• Latinxua Sinwenz (1926): Omitted tone sounds. Used mainly in the Soviet Union and Xinjiang in the 30s. Predecessor of Hanyu Pinyin.
• Lessing-Othmer: Used mainly in Germany.
• Postal System Pinyin (1906): Early standard for international addresses
• Wade-Giles (1912): Transliteration. Very popular from 19th century until recently and continues to be used by some Western academics.
• Yale (1942): Created by the U.S. for battlefield communication and used in the influential Yale textbooks.

Mainland China

• Hanyu Pinyin (1958): In Mainland China, Hanyu Pinyin has been used officially to romanize Mandarin for decades, primarily as a linguistic tool for teaching Standard Mandarin (the standardized Chinese spoken language) to students whose mother tongue is not Standard Mandarin. The system is also used in some other Chinese-speaking areas such as Singapore and parts of Taiwan, and has been adopted by much of the international community as a standard for writing Chinese words and names in the Roman alphabet. The value of Hanyu Pinyin in education in China lies in the fact that China, like any other populated area with comparable area and population, has literally thousands of distinct dialects, though there is just one common written language and one common standardized spoken form. (These comments apply to Romanization in general)
• ISO 7098 (1991): Very similar to Hanyu Pinyin.

Taiwan

• Gwoyeu Romatzyh: (1926): Used in mainland China before the communist takeover in 1949. Primarily used in Taiwan. Replaced by MPS II and no longer commonly used.
• Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II (1984): Primarily used in Taiwan. Not to be confused with MPS I which is Zhuyin. Replaced by Tongyong Pinyin and no longer commonly used.
• Tongyong Pinyin (2000): Primarily used in Taiwan. Literally means "Universal Spell Sound". Very similar to Hanyu Pinyin. Differences between the two are noted [here].

• Barnett-Chao
• Guangdong (1960)
• Hong Kong Government
• Jyutping
• Meyer-Wempe
• Sidney Lau
• Yale (1942)

• Guangdong (1960)
• Presbyterian Church in Taiwan

• Romanized BUC

Japanese

Romanization (or, more generally, Roman letters) is called "rōmaji" in Japanese. The most common systems are:

• Hepburn (1867): transcription
• Nihon-shiki (1885): transliteration. Also adopted as (ISO 3602 Strict) in 1989.
• Kunrei-shiki (1937): transliteration. Also adopted as (ISO 3602).
• JSL (1987)
• ALA-LC: Similar to Hepburn [link]
• Wāpuro: transliteration. Not strictly a system, but a collection of common practices.

Korean

Main article: Korean romanization

While romanization is often been carried out irrespective of any system, there are some rulesets available to choose from:

• McCune-Reischauer (MR; 1937?), the first transcription to gain some acceptance. A slightly changed 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. Uses breves, apostrophes and diereses, the latter two indicating orthographic syllable boundaries in cases that would otherwise be ambiguous.
  What is called MR may in many cases be any of a number of systems that differ from each other and from the original MR mostly in whether word endings are separated from the stem by a space, a hyphen or – according to McCune's and Reischauer's system – 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 aberrations are so widespread that any mention of "McCune-Reischauer romanization" may not necessarily refer to the original system as published in the 1930s.
• * The ALA-LC / U.S. Library of Congress system is an example of these systems that are based on MR, from which it deviates it in some aspects. Word division is addressed in detail, with generous use of spaces to separate word endings from stems that is not seen in MR. 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. Distinguishes between ‘ and ’. [link]

Several problems with MR led to the development of the newer systems:

• 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; 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. 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. Basically similar to MR, but uses no diacritics or apostrophes. 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.
• 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: [link]
• Lukoff romanization, developed 1945-47 for his Spoken Korean coursebooks [link]
• Joseon Gwahagwon (조선민주주의인민공화국 과학원) romanization

Thai

Thai, spoken in Thailand, is written with its own script, probably descended from Old Khmer, in the Brahmic family. Also see Thai alphabet.

• Royal Thai General System of Transcription:
• ALA-LC: [link]
• ISO 11940 (1998): Transliteration

Cyrillic

In linguistics, scientific transliteration is used for both Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets. This applies to Old Church Slavonic, as well as modern Slavic languages which use these alphabets.

Belarusian

See also: Belarusian Latin alphabet

• BGN/PCGN romanization of Belarusian, 1979 (United States Board on Geographic Names and Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use)
• Scientific transliteration, or the International Scholarly System for linguistics
• ALA-LC romanization, 1997 (American Library Association and Library of Congress): [link]
• ISO 9:1995
• Instruction on transliteration of Belarusian geographical names with letters of Latin script, 2000

Bulgarian

The official Bulgarian scheme for the Roman transliteration of Bulgarian Cyrillic is the English-oriented [Streamlined System] proposed by L.L. Ivanov and introduced by the [Antarctic Place-names Commission of Bulgaria] on 2 March 1995. The Streamlined System was subsequently adopted by the Bulgarian Government (Ordinances #61 of 2 April 1999 and #10 of 11 February 2000) for the purposes of introducing new [identity documents]. Presently the system is being promulgated by the [Ministry of Public Administration and Administrative Reform] for further usage in road signs, street names, official information systems, databases, local authorities’ websites etc.

In the USA and Britain, the US Board on Geographic Names ([BGN]) and the UK Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use ([PCGN]) still retain their 1952 [BGN/PCGN System] for the Romanization of Bulgarian, used primarily in the English spelling of Bulgarian geographical names. That system differs from the [Streamlined System] in the case of three Cyrillic letters. See also Romanization of Bulgarian.

• [L.L. Ivanov, On the Romanization of Bulgarian and English, Contrastive Linguistics, XXVIII (Sofia, 2003), 2, 109-118.]

Russian

There is no single universally accepted system of writing Russian using the Latin script — in fact there are a huge number of such systems: some are adjusted for a particular target language (e.g. German or French), some are designed as a librarian's transliteration, some are prescribed for Russian traveller's passports; the transcription of some names is purely traditional.   All this has resulted in great reduplication of names.   E.g. the name of the great Russian composer Tchaikovsky may also be written as Tchaykovsky, Tchajkovskij, Tchaikowski, Tschaikowski, Czajkowski, Čajkovskij, Čajkovski, Chajkovskij, Chaykovsky, Chaykovskiy, Chaikovski, Tshaikovski, Tšaikovski etc. Systems include:

• BGN/PCGN (1947): Transliteration system (United States Board on Geographic Names & Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use). [link]
• GOST 16876-71 (1971): A now defunct Soviet transliteration standard. Replaced by GOST 7.79, which is an ISO 9 equivalent.
• United Nations romanization system for geographical names (1987): Based on GOST 16876-71.
• ISO 9 (1995): Transliteration. From the International Organization for Standardization.
• ALA-LC (1997): [link]
• "Volapuk" encoding (1990s): Slang term (it's not really Volapük) for a writing method that's not truly a transliteration, but used for similar goals (see article).
• Conventional English transliteration is based to BGN/PCGN, but doesn't follow a particular standard. Described in detail at transliteration of Russian into English.

Ukrainian

Ukrainian personal names are usually transcribed phonetically; see the main article section Conventional romanization of proper names. The Ukrainian National system is used for geographic names in Ukraine.

• ALA-LC: [(PDF)].
• ISO 9
• Ukrainian National transliteration: [(JPEG, in Ukrainian)].
• Ukrainian National and BGN/PCGN systems, at the UN Working Group on Romanization Systems: [(PDF)].
• Thomas T. Pederson's comparison of five systems: [(PDF)].

Greek

Greek language includes the modern language spoken in Greece, as well as ancient Polytonic orthography. See also Greeklish.

• ISO 843 (1997): [link]
• ALA-LC: [link]
• Beta code: [link]

English

• [Re-Romanization of English]

Overview and summary

The chart below shows the most common phonemic transcription romanization used for several different alphabets. While it is sufficient for many casual users, there are multiple alternatives used for each alphabet, and many exceptions. For details, consult each of the language sections below. (Because the number of Hangul characters are prohibitively large, only the first characters are provided in the following table.)

ROMANIZED	Greek	Russian (Cyrillic)	Hebrew	Arabic	Katakana	Hangul
A	A	А	ַ, ֲ, ָ	دَ, دَ, ﺍ — ﺎ, دَىا	ア
AI			י ַ
B	ΜΠ, Β	Б	בּ	ﺏ ﺑ ﺒ ﺐ		ㅂ
C	Ξ
CH	TΣ̈	Ч	צ׳			ㅊ
CHI					チ
D	ΝΤ, Δ	Д	ד	ﺩ — ﺪ, ﺽ ﺿ ﻀ ﺾ		ㄷ
DH	Δ		דֿ	ﺫ — ﺬ
DZ	ΤΖ	Ѕ
E	Ε, ΑΙ	Э	, ֱ, י ֵֶ, ֵ, י ֶ		エ
F	Φ	Ф	פ (final ף )	ﻑ ﻓ ﻔ ﻒ
FU					フ
G	ΓΓ, ΓΚ, Γ	Г	ג			ㄱ
GH	Γ	Ғ	גֿ, עֿ	ﻍ ﻏ ﻐ ﻎ
H	Η	Һ	ח, ה	ﻩ ﻫ ﻬ ﻪ, ﺡ ﺣ ﺤ ﺢ		ㅎ
HA					ハ
HE					ヘ
HI					ヒ
HO					ホ
I	Η, Ι, Υ, ΕΙ, ΟΙ	И	ִ, י ִ	دِ	イ
IY				دِي
J	TZ̈	ДЖ, Џ	ג׳	ﺝ ﺟ ﺠ ﺞ		ㅈ
JJ						ㅉ
K	Κ	К	כּ (final ךּ )	ﻙ ﻛ ﻜ ﻚ		ㅋ
KA					カ
KE					ケ
KH	X	Х	כ ,חֿ (final ך )	ﺥ ﺧ ﺨ ﺦ
KI					キ
KK						ㄲ
KO					コ
KU					ク
L	Λ	Л	ל	ﻝ ﻟ ﻠ ﻞ
M	Μ	М	מ (final ם )	ﻡ ﻣ ﻤ ﻢ		ㅁ
MA					マ
ME					メ
MI					ミ
MO					モ
MU					ム
N	Ν	Н	נ (final ן )	ﻥ ﻧ ﻨ ﻦ		ㄴ
NA					ナ
NE					ネ
NI					ニ
NO					ノ
NU					ヌ
O	Ο, Ω	О	, ֳ, וֹֹ		オ
P	Π	П	פּ (final ףּ )			ㅍ
PP						ㅃ
PS	Ψ
Q	Θ		ק	ﻕ ﻗ ﻘ ﻖ
R	Ρ	Р	ר	ﺭ — ﺮ		ㄹ
RA					ラ
RE					レ
RI					リ
RO					ロ
RU					ル
S	Σ	С	ס, שׂ	ﺱ ﺳ ﺴ ﺲ, ﺹ ﺻ ﺼ ﺺ		ㅅ
SA					サ
SE					セ
SH	Σ̈	Ш	שׁ	ﺵ ﺷ ﺸ ﺶ
SHCH		Щ
SHI					シ
SO					ソ
SS						ㅆ
SU					ス
T	Τ	Т	ט, תּ, ת	ﺕ ﺗ ﺘ ﺖ, ﻁ ﻃ ﻄ ﻂ		ㅌ
TA					タ
TE					テ
TH	Θ		תֿ	ﺙ ﺛ ﺜ ﺚ
TO					ト
TS	ΤΣ	Ц	צ (final ץ )
TSU					ツ
TT						ㄸ
U	ΟΥ, Υ	У	, וֻּ	دُ	ウ
UW				دُو
V	B	В	ב
W	Ω		ו, וו	ﻭ — ﻮ
WA					ワ
WE					ヱ
WI					ヰ
WO					ヲ
X	Ξ, Χ
Y	Ψ	Й, Ы, Ј	י	ﻱ ﻳ ﻴ ﻲ
YA		Я			ヤ
YE		Е
YI		Ї
YO		Ё			ヨ
YU		Ю			ユ
Z	Ζ	З	ז	ﺯ — ﺰ, ﻅ ﻇ ﻈ ﻆ
ZH	Ζ̈	Ж	ז׳

See also

• Anglicisation
• Francization

External links

• [UNGEGN Working Group on Romanization Systems]
• [U.S. Library of Congress Romanization Tables] in PDF format
• [Java romanization app]
• One of the few printed books with lists of romanizations is ALA-LC Romanization Tables, Randall Barry (ed.), U.S. Library of Congress, 1997, ISBN 0844409405.

 

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