Korean and the Nightmare of Romanization

I'm a little obsessive about certain things. Okay, I'll be honest; I'm a lot obsessive about a lot of things. But that's not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about today is turning a language's script into English's Latin script and the pitfalls that come with that. Mostly about Korean and romanization.

First off, the Korean Language (한국어/한국말) uses Hangul (한글) as their writing system. This is an alphabet that was created in about 1443 during the Joseon Dynasty (조선시대), reportedly by the king at the time, King Sejong (세종대왕). It has a fantastic creation story and is really a beautiful alphabet, but that's for another post.

Now obviously, if you didn't know the alphabet, you wouldn't be able to read it. That's a given. And for a lot of people in the world, there is no real reason to learn how to read Hangul. So of course people are going to come up with a way to write Korean so that English speakers, or people who read the Latin alphabet, can read Korean, even if they don't understand it. This is especially helpful with names and brands and things of that nature. I get all that. That kind of thing is important, especially in a world where English is the business language.

But. What I don't get is how the different kind of romanizations for Hangul came about, and why they are so... wrong.

There are three different major romanization systems that I know of. McCune-Reischauer (MR), which came about in the 1930s and was the first officially accepted romanization. Yale, from the 1940s, which is the accepted romanization among linguists. Revised Romanization of Korean (RR), which is from the early 2000s, and is the current officially accepted romanization.

Let me give you an example of how different these three are -- and this comes from Wikipedia:

The Korean word for 'wall' is 벽. In MR this is pyŏk. In RR this is byeok/byeog. In Yale this is pyek.

The people who created the Yale romanization must have been smoking something, because what?

Now to be fair, Korean does have a lot of sounds that English doesn't have and a lot of rules that guide those sounds. And 벽 is a perfect example. ㅂ, or the letter bieup (비읍) is not exactly a 'B'. It's kind of in the middle of 'B' and 'P'. Then the 여 vowel sounds a bit like 'Yaw', no southern accent, made in the back of your throat. And then the ㄱ, or letter giyeok (기역) is normally in between a 'G' and a 'K' sound, but since it's at the end of the syllable then it sounds like a 'K' that is cut off before you finish making the sound.

So for the person who doesn't have a PhD in linguists, Revised Romanization is the closest approximation.

I would be completely okay with this if there was any kind of consistency. But there is no consistency, and so my little obsessive brain grimaces and can't process Korean written in the Latin alphabet.

Here's a couple of examples:

One of the most common last names in Korea is the name 이. Most of the time this is romanized as Lee, which while partially correct thanks to North Korea, is not the sound 이 makes. Other times it is romanized as Yi, and still other times it is romanized as I, and sometimes as Rhee. See how different it all is?

Of course, that's not the best example, sometimes Lee or Rhee is correct. There is the name 이, and there is also the name 리, which is the North Korean version.

Here's another example.

A couple singers that I know of have the name 정민. However, for one of them it is spelled Jungmin, and for the other one it is Jeongmin. Now, this is probably to differentiate the two singers, so not the best example. So here's another one.

There is a famous old university north of where I am called 성균관대학교. Now, 대학교, or Daehakkyo is the word for university, and I'm not picking on that one. What I am picking on is how 성균관 is romanized.

Sung Kyun Kwan.

You probably can't see it, so let me make it a little clearer.

성 has one vowel there on the right, the 어 vowel, which is pronounced kind of like 'aw' at the back of your throat.
균 has one vowel in the middle there, the 유 vowel, which sounds like 'you.'
관 has two vowels that make a 'wa' sound, but that's not the focus here.

The focus is on 어 and 유 being romanized with the same Latin vowel, even though the two sounds are completely different.

Can you see the problem here?

And there is things like Hyundai (현대) and Samsung (삼성) and even the names Park (박) and Choi (최), well known names and brands that have been romanized in such a way that unless you know the Hangul, you will never be able to pronounce it correctly.

I don't really have a solution to this. I'm not a linguist, and I'm definitely not in any kind of position to suggest changes. But it's something that frustrates me on a daily basis.

Do you know a foreign language? How about a foreign writing system? Tell me about it in the comments!

Thanks for reading!