Sunday, December 2, 2007


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 (or none). Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, and transcription, for representing the spoken word. The latter can be subdivided into phonemic 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.
Examples of languages to which this process is often applied are Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK).
Cyrillization is the similar process of representing a language using the Cyrillic alphabet.

Methods of romanization

Main article: Transliteration Transliteration

Main article: Transcription (linguistics) Transcription
See also: Phonemic orthography
Most romanizations are intended to enable the casual reader who is unfamiliar with the original script to pronounce the source language reasonably accurately. Such romanizations follow the principle of phonemic 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.

Phonemic
See also: Phonetic transcription
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.

Phonetic
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. Furthermore due to diachronic and synchronic variance no written language represents any spoken language with perfect accuracy and the vocal interpretation of a script may vary by a great degree among languages. In modern times the chain of transcription is usually spoken foreign language, written foreign language, written native language, spoken (read) native language. Reducing the number of those processes, i.e. removing one or both steps of writing, usually leads to more accurate oral articulations. 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 zyûzyutu may allow someone who knows Japanese to reconstruct the kana syllables じゅうじゅつ, but most native English speakers or rather readers would find it easier to guess the pronunciation from the Hepburn version, jūjutsu.

Tradeoffs

Romanization of specific writing systems
For more detail, see Arabic transliteration
The Arabic alphabet is used to write Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. Romanization standards include:

Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (1936): [1] Adopted by the International Convention of Orientalist Scholars in Rome. It is the basis for the very influential Hans Wehr dictionary (ISBN 0-87950-003-4).
BS 4280 (1968): Developed by the British Standards Institute [2]
SATTS (1970s): Developed by US military
UNGEGN (1972): [3]
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 [4]
ISO 233-2(1993). Simplified transliteration.
Buckwalter Transliteration (1990s): Developed at Xerox by Tim Buckwalter [5]; doesn't require unusual diacritics [6]
ALA-LC (1997): [7]
Arabic Chat Alphabet Arabic
For more details, see Hebrew alphabet and Romanization of Hebrew.

ANSI Z39.25 (1975):
UNGEGN (1977): [8]
ISO 259 (1984): Transliteration.
ISO 259-2 (1994): Simplified transliteration.
ISO/DIS 259-3: Phonemic transcription.
ALA-LC: [9] Hebrew
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: [10]
See also: Devanagari transliteration and Romanization of Malayalam

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: [11]
The National Library at Kolkata romanization, intended for the romanization of all Indic scripts, is an extension of IAST
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.
MEFI: A fantasy name of a transliteration alphabet created by Gabriel Pradiipaka, also into 7-bit ASCII [12]
ISCII (1988) Brahmic scripts

Main article: Romanization of Chinese Chinese

ALA-LC: Used to be similar to Wade-Giles [13], but converted to Hanyu Pinyin since 2000 [14]
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.
Chinese Postal Map Romanization (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.
Legge romanization: Created by James Legge a Scottish missionary. Mainland China

Main article: Romanization of Chinese in Taiwan Taiwan

Main article: Chinese language romanisation in Singapore Singapore

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

The latin phonetic method of Shanghainese Standard Shanghainese

Pe̍h-oē-jī (POJ), once the de facto official script of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan (since the late 19th century). Technically this represented a largely phonemic transcription system, as Min Nan was not commonly written in Chinese.
Guangdong (1960), for the distinct Teochow variety. Min Nan

Romanized BUC Min Dong

Main article: Romanization of Japanese Japanese
Main article: Korean romanization
While romanization is often been carried out irrespective of any system, there are some rulesets available to choose from:
Several problems with MR led to the development of the newer systems:

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 '. [16]
    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: [17]
    Lukoff romanization, developed 1945-47 for his Spoken Korean coursebooks [18]
    Joseon Gwahagwon (조선민주주의인민공화국 과학원) romanization Korean
    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: [19]
    ISO 11940 (1998): Transliteration Thai
    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.

    Cyrillic

    Main article: Romanization of Belarusian Belarusian

    Main article: Romanization of Bulgarian Bulgarian

    Main article: Romanization of Russian Russian

    Main article: Romanization of Ukrainian Ukrainian
    Greek language includes the modern language spoken in Greece, as well as ancient Polytonic orthography. See also Greeklish.

    ISO 843 (1997): [23]
    ALA-LC: [24]
    Beta code: [25] Romanized Overview and summary

    Anglicisation
    Francization
    Transliteration
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