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I recently saw an article that employed an interesting type of romanization of Korean. Here is an example:

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It looks like a mix of Revised Romanization and Yale that replaces digraphs like eo or ng with IPA-like characters, but I couldn't find this type of romanization listed anywhere. Is this an established system and if so what is it called?

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  • To me this looks like mostly just IPA (with y replacing j, which is common in some traditions).
    – Draconis
    Mar 22, 2021 at 3:39
  • But it's not transcribing the pronunciation.. It is still a transliteration that is independent from phonetic reality (e.g. 'mos' for 못, 'c' for ㅈ).
    – schoekling
    Mar 22, 2021 at 9:12
  • Might be phonemic / phonological (i.e. sound-systematic) instead of phonetic (i.e. true to surface sounds). Indistinguishable from the short excerpt, it might also be a transliteration (i.e. a bijective rendering of one script into another). Mar 22, 2021 at 19:18
  • As I've mentioned, I am pretty sure it's a transliteration.
    – schoekling
    Mar 23, 2021 at 11:27

1 Answer 1

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This is the first time I've seen it, and it seems idiosyncratic. It appears to be a morphophonemic transcription based on Yale, as you can see from the way 못하지 is transcribed mos.ha.ci.

Other similarities between this system and Yale are evident in the consonants, e.g. using <k, kk, kh> rather than <g/k, kk, k> for ㄱㄲㅋ. It follows most romanisations in the treatment of orthographic iotated vowels (use of <y>) and the majority of orthographic compound vowels (use of <w>).

The difference from Yale is evident in the vowels. 먹으면 is transcribed meg.u.myen in Yale, but here, ㅓ is mapped to <ɔ> and ㅡ to <ɨ>. There is some inconsistency in how ㄹ is transcribed here: I see <l> for 이런, but <r> in 기다려도; Yale uses l consistently. Likely to be a typo though.

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  • As for the L vs R thing, it could depend on whether it's at the syllable onset or in the coda Mar 30, 2021 at 18:49
  • @OmarL it would be, except 이런 and 기다려도 are both syllable onset ㄹ, and thus would be treated identically by normal transliteration schemes. For reference, this transliteration scheme uses <l> for 필요.
    – Michaelyus
    Mar 30, 2021 at 22:24

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