Romanization

In antiquity, Romanization was also the imposing of Roman culture and language.

A Romanization or Romanisation is a system for representing a language with the Roman alphabet, where these typically use a writing system other than the Roman alphabet. Three methods may be used to carry out Romanization: transliteration, transcription and phonemic conversion. Each Romanization has its own set of rules for pronunciation of the Romanized words.

To romanize is to transcribe or transliterate a language into the Roman alphabet. This process is most commonly associated with the Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages (CJK).

(The similar process of representing a language using the Cyrillic alphabet may be named Cyrillization.)

Table of contents

1 Chinese language

1.1 External links

2 Japanese language
3 Korean language
4 Russian language

Chinese language

Some languages have more than one system of Romanization; Mandarin, for example, has several, including Wade-Giles, Yale, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, MPS II, Postal System Pinyin, Tongyong Pinyin, and Hanyu pinyin; and Cantonese has Jyutping, penkyamp, Gwohngdongwaa pengyam, Sidney Lau, Barnett-Chao, Meyer-Wempe, and Yale.

In Mainland China, Hanyu Pinyin has been used officially for decades, primarily as a linguistic tool for teaching the official Mandarin variant of Chinese to students whose mother tongue is not Mandarin. The Roman alphabet is used to commonalise the pronunciation of Mandarin words, since Chinese characters describe only things and concepts, and provide no pronunciation information. China has literally hundreds of distinct dialects, though there is one common written language.

External links

拼音查詢 (Pinyin query) (in Traditional Chinese): Type in Chinese character or sentences to receive four Romanizations and Zhuyin
Romanization.com

Japanese language

Romanization in Japanese is called "Romaji". Common systems include Hepburn and Kunrei-shiki, which is also known as ISO 3602, the system approved by ISO.

Korean language

''Main article: Korean romanization

Until recently, the official system in South Korea was the McCune-Reischauer system, which is still used in North Korea. Today, South Korea uses the revised version of Romanization that was approved in 2000. Road signs and textbooks are required to follow these rules as soon as possible. Personal names are still left to personal preference, but the government encourages using the new system. A third system—the Yale Romanization system—is used mainly in academic literature. During the period of Russian interest in Korea at the beginning of the 20th century, attempts were also made at representing Korean in Cyrillic.

Russian language

There is no single universally accepted system of writing Russian using the Latin scriptÃÂÃÂin 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, Czajkowski, Čajkovskij, Čajkovski, Chajkovskij, Chaykovsky, Chaykovskiy, Chaikovski etc.