Revised Romanization of Korean - Criticism

Criticism

Despite governmental promotion, the revised system met with considerable opposition among foreign residents in South Korea, many of whom felt the revised system contained serious flaws and felt that the government failed to consult with them beforehand, they being the primary users of Romanized Korean inside South Korea.

Critics of the Revised Romanization System say that the one-to-one correspondence of Korean characters to Roman letters (e.g., usually representing ㄱ as g) that is the hallmark of the new system is overly simplistic and fails to represent sound changes that occur naturally when the position of a consonant changes (e.g., at the beginning of a word, ㄱ is pronounced closer to an unaspirated k, rather than as a straight g). A frequent complaint of many foreign residents and visitors to South Korea is that both Romanization systems hinder accurate and comprehensible rendering of Korean pronunciation.

Critics also complain that digraphs such as eo and eu, denoting sounds that differ from conventional European use, confuse those unfamiliar with the language. In English, for instance, eo as found in geography, Leonardo, or neon represents a sequence of two vowels, not the Korean monophthong. Defenders of the system cite English words such as surgeon as evidence of the appropriateness of the combination, even though the sound is not an exact match (the e has the role of softening the g to a j-sound, and is not actually part of the vowel). Other supporters point out that it is a system intended to transliterate into the Roman alphabet, not English. However, other languages with a large inventory of distinct vowel phonemes similar to Korean (such as Turkish, Hungarian, or Swedish) resort to diacritics, with the exception of English, with its notoriously cumbersome orthography. German, for example, usually writes ae, oe, and ue as ä, ö, and ü, with the umlaut originating as a tiny "e" written above the vowel, and only uses digraphs when umlauts are unavailable, or in certain names (such as Goethe). Also, a digraph, namely eu, is used to represent a very short vowel that is often used as an epenthetic vowel for borrowings from English and other languages, leading to situations where the cluster str-, for example, ends up being written as seuteur-.

One motivation for the digraph "eo" appears to be an analogy with the conventional romanization "Seoul" of the South Korean capital. This romanization derives from an old French romanization Séoul in which the two syllables of this name denote "sé" and "oul", reflecting French orthography. The revised romanization instead treats this as a combination of "seo" and "ul", since u normally renders the second vowel (in accord with North European orthography).

The Ministry of Culture & Tourism says that the change was necessary because the McCune-Reischauer system did not adequately reflect important characteristics of the Korean language, making it difficult for native Korean speakers to use. For example, "The difference between some voiced and non-voiced sounds are in Korean little more than allophones, but old system transcribed these as entirely different phonemes."

This, however, does not explain why the already existing Yale Romanization was not adopted by the Korean government instead.

Despite criticism by foreigners accustomed to using McCune Reischauer, often people who do not know Korean, many foreign residents and scholars have found the new system simple and logical. While all Romanization schema may be akin to learning a new language, the NGR (New Government Romanization) is applied much more easily after short study. In the past the majority of non-Korean fluent users of Romanization did not understand the purpose of diacritics, hence often omitting them and confusing everyone else.