The Romanisation of Korean: A Solution or a Problem?

Other romanisation systems in use are the ALA-LC (American Library Association – Library of Congress), which is used to represent bibliographic information by North American libraries and the British Library, and it emphasises the use of hyphens to separate syllables, but greatly disregards sound changes; and the Yale romanisation system, widely used among linguists, and distinguished by its focus on the morphophonemic structure of words (i.e. the sound changes produced in morphemes when combined to form words). While all these systems have advantages and disadvantages, one common denominator in their partial failure is the reference language they use: English.

English, an inadequate reference language

English is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, and it is often used as a lingua franca among foreigners from different countries, so in a way it does make sense that this be the language used as reference for standard romanisations of the Korean language. However, from the point of view of phonetic accuracy, since English and Korean phonologies (i.e. the collection of sounds specific to each language) are completely different, it becomes rather difficult to learn to pronounce Korean words correctly. Every language has its own set of sounds, and its own correlation of those sounds to the letters/characters in its alphabets, therefore it is counterproductive to try to represent a sound from a language (in this case, Korean) using a language that does not have that sound (English). In addition, non-English learners of Korean will often read the English romanisations following the set of pronunciation rules from their own languages, which adds another layer of confusion.

While romanisations can be useful for those that do not want/need to learn Korean, but rather just need to read some random Korean words (e.g. from a menu at a restaurant), or those who are beginning to learn the language but don’t quite know Hangeul yet, it is discouraged to rely on them too much, as if you become too dependent on them, it will be very difficult to get accustomed to reading Hangeul and to pronouncing it properly. This was the case of a Japanese classmate of mine, who struggled to pronounce 오, even though the teacher was clearly demonstrating how to say it, and the fact that in Japanese they have a character that is pronounced the exact same way, just because she was too focused on the romanisation and kept pronouncing it in English.