Romanization
A Romanization or Latinization is a system for representing a word or language with the Latin alphabet, where the original word or language used 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.
A scholar writing in a European language which uses the Latin alphabet may devise a romanization of a non-European one by a system unique to the phonetics of the language of the scholar. For example, the sound indicated by the digraph "ch" is different in the French, German, English, and Italian languages, so that each might have a different romanization of a non-European language. A scholar might also devise a rule for transcription different from the phonemic pattern of the non-European one. For example, when the Japanese character hatsuon precedes a syllable beginning with "m", it is pronounced as "m"; when it ends a word, it is a nasalized sound made in the back of the mouth. Romanizations have been made with distinctions between these. But recent fashion has been for the officials of non-European countries to prescribe their own systems. The Library of Congress, among other bureaus throughout the world, has freely accepted Pinyin and has recently eliminated the transcription variants for the Japanese hatsuon to get it into line with Japanese practice, although it is more difficult phonetically.
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.)
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 EFEO.
In Mainland China, Hanyu Pinyin has been used officially 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, 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.
External links
- 拼音查詢 (Pinyin query) (http://www.iqchina.com/going/PinYin2.asp) (in Traditional Chinese): Type in Chinese character or sentences to receive four Romanizations and Zhuyin
- Romanization.com (http://www.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 2002, the official system in South Korea was the McCune-Reischauer system, which is still used in North Korea. Today, South Korea officially 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, at a cost estimated by the government to be at least US$20 million. Proper 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 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 etc.
See also Transliteration of Russian into English.
Belarusian language
The Belarusian language has been written with both Cyrillic and Latin scripts. Today the Latin script (Łacinka or Łacinica) is rarely used (although it has its advocates). Still it would seem that Belarusian has already a native romanization system, so we need not to invent anything. However, usually Belarusian names are transcribed differently, using a system like that for the Russian language. Names are then changed like this: Homiel → Homyel', Mahiloŭ → Mahilyow, Viciebsk → Vitsebsk, Baranavičy → Baranavichy, Žytkavičy → Zhytkavichy etc.
Arabic language
(to be added)
Indic scripts
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. In 2001, a standard transliteration convention was codified in the ISO 15919 standard, which very much resembles the "Library of Congress" and IAST schemes. It uses diacritics to map the much larger set of Brahmic consonants and vowels to the Latin script. Other schemes use upper and lower case and doubling of letters, to avoid the use of diacritics. The Indian character encoding standard ISCII treats the romanized form as one among many script choices.
Greek language
See Greeklish.
Also see
External links
- Transliteration of Indic scripts: how to use ISO 15919 (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/stone-catend/trind.htm)
- UNGEGN Working Group on Romanization Systems (http://www.eki.ee/wgrs/)
In antiquity, Romanization or Latinization was also the imposition of Roman culture and language.
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