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Yet another romanization proposal for Korean

in ,
Yet another romanization proposal for Korean

https://preview.redd.it/vai9nm8jmdte1.png?width=1287&format=png&auto=webp&s=ed25337235beed12bccc12baa4ee441bd29dd091

Here is my personal proposal for a new romanization system for Korean.

So unless you have been living under a rock for the past hundred years, everyone in the global community know that while English may now be the most popular language (assuming you include second language speakers), it is unfortunately one of the least consistently spelled language in the world, and as such a poor example to follow when it comes to creating a Romanization system. Furthermore, it also does not match how Hangul works well either.

Many people think this is mismatch is inevitable, and to an extant it is. However, it doesn’t have to be that way always. Here’s my take, which takes inspiration from different world languages that have similar features to Korean.

  • WHY ARE THEY ALL ORDERED THAT WAY
    • I ordered it in the traditional order King Sejong had it. If you have a problem, feel free to take it up to King Sejong.
  • Why are ㅋㅌㅍㅊ spelled with a “-h”?
    • These consonants are derived from ㄱㄷㅂㅈ+ㅎ. To reflect the extra stoke functioning as ㅎ, they are there.
  • Why are ㄲㄸㅃㅆㅉ spelled like that?
    • My idea was to spell them the same way if there was a vowel of the same series of consonants in front of them: 악기 and 아끼 sounds the same, so they both get spelled <akki>. (first one can be spelled <ak’gi> for disambiguation). 맞지 and 마찌 would also get pronounced the same, so they both get spelled <matchi>, or <mat’ji> for disambiguation.
  • Why is ㅓ spelled e? It sounds nothing like how anybody reads “e”
    • Meanwhile, Indonesians and Chinese:
    • More seriously, it’s because I realized people don’t mind diacritics necessarily, but they don’t want to use diacritics for sounds that are more common in Korean while not using diacritics for sounds that are more rare in Korean. This issue is amplified if no other commonly used languages use those diacritics in question in the way Korean does.
    • Also, while English does have this sound (roughly), it doesn’t have a consistent way to spell this sound across all environments. As such, we can’t use how English spells this sound.
  • What’s going on with the ㅐㅔ being spelled ä / ë?
    • Unlike English, German does share a feature with Korean in their vowels: Korean 아 애 오 외 우 위 correspond to German a ä o ö u ü. The resemblance is uncanny actually. I decided that because the feature in Korean and the feature in German are so similar, I decided to copy the entire set, and even expand on it to make 에/의 correspond to ë/ÿ.
  • Why is ㅡ spelled as y?
    • Blame basically the entire Slavic language family plus Welsh. At least they’re consistent and actually have the sound unlike English.

TL;DR: Languages beside English often actually do have similar problems Korean has, as well as solutions that worked better for them than in Korean. Let’s use it instead of pulling spellings out of our butts.

submitted by /u/DepressionDokkebi
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