Hangul and Other Languages

• Main
• Hangul Alphabets
• Hangul Structures
• Hangul and Other Languages
  • Hangul Romanizations
    • Hangul Consonant Romanization Table
    • Hangul Vowel Romanization Table
  • Hangul Representation of Foreign Words
    • Consonant Hangul Table
    • Vowel Hangul Table
• Resources
• Hangul Conversion Tool
• Non-Korean Names in Hangul

There are serveral ways to represent Hangul in Roman alphabets. Since phonemes from two different languages cannot be the same, it's always tricky to come up with a system that can satisfy everyone.

One is by MunHwaGwanGwangBu (문화관광부 MunHwaGwanGwangBu / Ministry of Culture and Tourism) on July 7, 2000. Another is by the Korean Language Society (한글학회 HanGeulHakHoe) in 1984. ISO (ISO/TR 11941:1996) is another method. The ISO method actually contains two, one for North Korea (DPRK) and the other for South Korea (ROK).

There are other less used ones such as the Yale, Lukoff and Horne methods.

The thing is, with all these standard methods, people still come up with their own ways of writing, for example, their names. I had my own, but I will try to follow the MCT method as much as possible.

The MCT method has the following priciples.

1. The romanization should follow the standard Korean pronunciation.
2. The romanization should avoid using anything other than the roman alphabets (i.e., no accents).

I have additional rules based on the MCT methods.

1. The sound can be ambiguous and I hate any punctuation inbetween, so the first character of each syllable can be capitalized, especially when it is uncommon or long (i.e., not "hangul").
2. For proper nouns (e.g., a name of a person), it should respect how their owners (?) spelled them. This is actually specified in the MCT document, but I wanted to make it clear.

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1. Only the modern set of Hangul jamo's should be used.
2. One phoneme should be represented by only one symbol.
3. For the final sounds, only the following is used: ㄱ, ㄴ, ㄹ, ㅁ, ㅂ, ㅅ, ㅇ.
4. A plosive should not be represented by "thick sound" (된소리, i.e., ㄲ, ㄸ, ㅃ, ㅆ, ㅉ).
5. Those foreign word representations that are already widely in use should be respected.

These tables use a version of International Phonetic Alphabets by the Internation Phonetic Association.

Anyway, the MOE's rules don't seem to be complete (e.g., it's missing "oo" for "foot"), but that will have to do here. Just try to match as closely as possible and that would be fine.

As you can easily notice, there are some English sounds that are not in Korean. So, for those cases, after double conversion, they might sound somewhat different. :) Here are some examples.

• fork - 포크 - PoKeu / pork - 포크 - PoKeu
• vie - 바이 - BaI / by - 바이 - BaI
• thigh - 사이 - SaI / sigh - 사이 - SaI

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