Critical Pedagogy/Case Studies/What's Wrong With Wiki Ways/Romanization of Korean

Executive Summary for wiki policy making and remaking

The so-called "Revised Romanization of Korean" (RR) since 2000 consists of dualist (RR) or Janus-faced (ЯR) modes in fact, however practically disguised in effect, so as to:
 * begin with the transcription of spoken Korean in phonetic hangul, hence 1:1? complex confusing epidemic orthoepy, and
 * end with the transliteration of written Korean in canonic hangul, hence 1:1! simplex clear-cut academic orthography.

Meanwhile, it is quite anomalous, exceptional, and self-contradictory that adopted likely doing harm to the wiki's self-consistency as well as doing injustice to the Korean language.
 * the academic orthographic transliteration-oriented wikis
 * the epidemic orthoepic transcription-oriented mode of RR,

Therefore, the wikis of justice may well take it seriously whether the wiki mode out of the dualist RR is to be:
 * reaffirmed in spite of such anomaly, or
 * readjusted in stead of that reasonably.

Revised Romanization of Korean

 * In addition to the Romanization of Korean, the following is a Wikiversity translation of the 2000 로마자 표기법 also known as " Revised Romanization of Korean."

Chapter 1. Basic Principles

 * Section 1.1 : The Romanization of Korean shall in principle be based on the orthoepic transcription of canonic Korean pronunciation.
 * Section 1.2 : Symbols other than Roman letters shall be avoided as far as possible.

Chapter 2. General Provisions
Section 2.1 Vowels

Section 2.2 Consonants

wikt: Wiktionary:About Korean
Korean is written in hangeul and hanja (CJKV) script. Romanizations (transliterations into the Latin alphabet) are included in Korean entries to help readers whose native script is the Latin script [...].

wikt: Wiktionary:About Korean
To accommodate the diverse needs and fluency levels of readers, each Korean phrase or term should be expressed in at least three forms: a han-geul version, a Revised Korean Romanization version, and an English language translation. [...]. The 2000 South Korean Revised Romanization is currently the Wiktionary standard. Others in use at Wiktionary include McCune-Reischauer romanization and Yale romanization.

wikt: Wiktionary:About Korean/Romanization
In Article 3 Paragraph 8 of the 2000 edict establishing the Revised Romanization, provision is made for a system for academic use which represents the original hangul more precisely than standard RR. This system uses the standard jamo equivalents, without exception: for example, ㄱ is represented as "g" regardless of position and pronunciation. Thus for example 백 is baeg, and 막히다 is maghida (cf. baek, makhida in the standard system). In addition, syllable-initial ㅇ is represented by a hyphen. Thus "백이" is romanized "baeg-i" while "배기" is romanized "baegi."

RR transliteration is almost entirely unambiguous in its representation of written Korean. However, it does not represent pronunciation clearly.

wikt: Wiktionary:Transliteration and romanization

 * Foreign scripts
 * A foreign term written in a language with a non-Roman phonetic alphabet should be accompanied by a transliteration in most places it appears [...].

wikt: Wiktionary:Transliteration and romanization
Because most languages have multiple systems for romanization, any language that sees frequent romanization in Wiktionary should have a language considerations page defining the romanization standard to be used in Wiktionary.

Pages documenting romanization systems should be placed in the appropriate categories.


 * wikt:Category:Transliteration appendices: details of established romanization systems
 * wikt:Category:Wiktionary:Transliteration: romanization systems developed or modified for Wiktionary

wikt: Wiktionary:Transliteration and romanization

 * Romanization
 * Rendering of written text from a foreign writing system into the Latin (Roman) alphabet, possibly supplemented by diacritical marks or additional characters.


 * Wiki-romanization
 * A romanization system chosen for Wiktionary. It is usually a common standard of romanization, or based on one and modified for Wiktionary's specific needs.


 * Transliteration
 * Literally "lettering across". Rendering of written text from one alphabet or syllabary into another, letter by letter. In Wiktionary we are mainly concerned with transliteration from a foreign system into the Latin alphabet (a subset of romanization).


 * Transcription
 * Literally "writing across". Transcription has several meanings, including transliteration and phonetic transcription, the written representation of spoken language. [...]

Transliteration and romanization are not pronunciation. They relate to the written languages, not to the spoken languages. Although these systems will often approximate the pronunciation of a language, that remains a secondary consideration to their development. Thus, the very common Russian genitive singular ending -ого would normally be transliterated as -ogo but pronounced /-ovo/

Transliteration

 * Transliteration is not concerned with representing the phonemics of the original: it only strives to represent the characters accurately.
 * From an information-theoretical point of view, systematic transliteration is a mapping from one system of writing into another, word by word, or ideally letter by letter. Transliteration attempts to use a one-to-one correspondence and be exact, so that an informed reader should be able to reconstruct the original spelling of unknown transliterated words. Ideally, reverse transliteration is possible.
 * Transliteration is opposed to transcription, which specifically maps the sounds of one language to the best matching script of another language. Still, most systems of transliteration map the letters of the source script to letters pronounced similarly in the goal script, for some specific pair of source and goal language. If the relations between letters and sounds are similar in both languages, a transliteration may be (almost) the same as a transcription. In practice, there are also some mixed transliteration/transcription systems that transliterate a part of the original script and transcribe the rest.
 * In Modern Greek usage (and since the Roman Imperial period), the letters <η> <ι> <υ> and the letter combinations <ει>  <υι> may be pronounced [i]. When so pronounced, a modern transcription renders them all as &lt;i>, but a transliteration still distinguishes them, for example by transliterating to <?> &lt;i>  and   .

Transcription (linguistics)

 * Transcription in the linguistic sense is the systematic representation of language in written form. The source can either be utterances (speech) or preexisting text in another writing system, although some linguists consider only the former to be transcription.
 * Transcription should not be confused with translation, [...], or with transliteration which means representing a text from one script in another (e.g. transliterating a Cyrillic text into the Latin script).
 * Which type of transcription is chosen depends mostly on the research interests pursued. Since phonetic transcription strictly foregrounds the phonetic nature of language, it is most useful for phonetic or phonological analyses. Orthographic transcription, on the other hand, has a morphological and a lexical component alongside the phonetic component (which aspect is represented to which degree depends on the language and orthography in question). [...] Phonetic transcription is doubtlessly more systematic in a scientific sense, but it is also harder to learn, more time-consuming to carry out and less widely applicable than orthographic transcription.

w: Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Korea-related articles

 * Korean words transliterated into English should use the Revised Romanization, unless they are used in specifically North Korean context [...]. The exception to this rule are English words borrowed from Korean and frequently used in a non-Korean context, whose irregular spellings have crystallized in English. Examples of such words include Hangul, kimchi, and taekwondo [which should be spelled as "Hangeul (or Han-geul)", "gimchi", and "taegwondo" respectively in Revised Romanization, or [...].
 * While Hangul and mixed script (Hangul and Hanja together) use spaces between words, text written only in Hanja is usually written without spaces. Thus, gosokhwa doro ("freeway" or "motorway") is written as 고속화 도로 (with a space) in Hangul, but as 高速化道路 (without a space) in Hanja.

Critical question and discussion

 * See: wikt: Wiktionary:Beer parlour/What is the WT way of RR?

It is clear from the above excerpts from the wiki documents that the wiki romanization basically has to do with the transliteration of written, rather than transcription of spoken, languages from non-roman to roman script.

Anomalously, exceptionally, and self-contradictorily, however, such is not the case with the wiki romanization of Korean, though based on the so-called Revised Romanization (RR) since 2000, which in fact is dualist (RR) or Janus-faced (ЯR), however practically disguised in effect, as follows:
 * 1) epidemic, complex, confusing, 1:1 matching(?) "transcription" of Korean spoken in phonetic hangul orthoepy.
 * 2) academic, simplex, clear-cut, 1:1 matching(!) transliteration of Korean written in canonic hangul orthography.

Then, such anomalous, exceptional, self-contradictory injustice currently being done to the Korean language may well be readjusted just by the wikis of justice.

General arguments

 * The wikis ought to be a global, collaborative, non-profit panopticon, rather than ivory tower for power, of inference from reference to experience and intelligence.

Special arguments

 * MR has to do with the orthoepy of spoken Korean.
 * The transcription, or transfer from speech to script, lets the focus of:
 * orthoepy be on spoken Korean in phonetic hangul, or primordially,
 * orthography on written Korean in canonic hangul.
 * The transliteration, or transfer from script to script, has nothing to do with speech and orthoepy, but script at hand and orthography at last.

Underlying motivation

 * Introduction to Critical Pedagogy


 * See also
 * He who knows does not speak, he who speaks does not know.
 * — Lao Tzu
 * In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
 * — Martin Luther King, Jr
 * You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.
 * — English proverb