A Comparative Study on the Romanization of Korean and Japanese with English as the Standard of Pronunciation.

한.일 로마자 표기의 비교연구 - 영어발음기준 -

  • Published : 1996.02.01

Abstract

The two existing romanization systems in Korea, namely the recently promulgated Ministry of Education version sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences incorporating for the most part the McCune-Reischauer system and the Hangeul Haghoe or the Korean Language Society's version, must be judged as failures: He fennel for its disregard of Korean orthography and pronunciation, use of Latin-oriented pronunciation despite its assertion that English is the standard used, and the greatest weakness of all, its use of phonetic symbols neither found in regular typewriters, teleprinters, word processors and telex machines nor understood by laymen, sometimes not even by specialists. And the latter suffers from its undue emphasis on Korean orthography, Latin-oriented pronunciation being only partly capable of representing Korean pronunciation, among other shortcomings. Since the two existing romanization systems of Korean in South Korea, and romanization system of Japanese with Latin-oriented pronunciation are woefully inadequate, in today's world where English is used as if it were the international language almost all over the world, the present writer has invented a completely new system of romanizing Korean and Japanese by the so-called pseudo-phonetic method. This method employs the roman letters only and uses thorn in place of phonetic symbols as long as the letters thus applied are believed to have constant sound value. The English pronunciation is the standard used for this system.

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