earticle

영어

The Points at Issue and Betterments on Korean Romanisation System Bae, Jae-Duk This paper is to review and compare the past six Romanisation drafts of Korean since the Mccune-Reischauer in 1939 and Korea's single Hangeul notation, which is based on the mutual agreement, and then puts the main changes of each revised alphabet system. Especially, this paper demonstrates a deep comparison between '84 system and the new one. The results of investigation show that the new system is operated by the Korean writing system and not by the English one, which is quite different from the past Romanisations. And in the PC-Internet period, also the new one enables everyone to read and write Latin letters easily instead of using diacritical marks. The findings are as follows. 1. Korean consonants have no voicing on the plosives of the syllable initials, but English ones have voicing. Reflecting this, ㄱ, ㄷ, ㅂ, ㅈ, syllable initials of Hangeul substitute for Latin letters g, d, b, j respectively regardless of voicing. Latin s always stands for ㅅ without the position of ㅅ by the new notation. In previous ones, Latin sh represents ㅅ before ㅣ. Also, k', t', p', ch' of the previous one are changed into k(ㅋ), t(ㅌ), p(ㅍ), ch(ㅊ) without aspiration mark, apostrophe('). 2. As for vowel letters, Latin letter e in case of eu(ㅡ) and eo(ㅓ) is replaced into the micron(ˇ) over o and u in such as ŭ and ŏ. In conclusion, 7 Roman letters of the 40 letters that are used for Korean correspondences have shown variability whenever the system was revised. Others such as letter by letter or sound unit by sound unit have not been unchanged and in consistency since it was set up. Caution is needed in the future implementation of Romanisation in that it should fully take into account of predictability of people’s language use in order not to waste money due to unprepared policy.