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See Romanization (cultural) for the spread of Roman culture, law and language.: See Uniform Turkic Alphabet for Latinization of former USSR languages See Latinisation for Latinization of names in literature In linguistics, romanization (or Latinization, also spelled romanisation or Latinisation) is the representation of a word or language with the Roman (Latin) alphabet, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system (or none). Methods of romanization include transliteration, representing written text, and transcription, representing the spoken word. The latter can be subdivided into phonemic transcription, which records the phonemes or units of semantic meaning in speech, and more strict phonetic transcription, which records speech sounds with precision. Each romanization has its own set of rules for pronunciation of the romanized words. Examples of languages to which this process is often applied are the Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK). Cyrillization is the similar process of representing a language using the Cyrillic alphabet. Transliteration If the romanization attempts to transliterate the original script, the guiding principle is a one-to-one mapping of characters in the source language into the target script, with less emphasis on how the result sounds when pronounced according to the reader's language. For example, the Nihon-shiki romanization of Japanese allows the informed reader to reconstruct the original Japanese kana syllables with 100% accuracy, but is not readable without prior study. Phonemic Most romanizations are intended to enable the casual reader who is unfamiliar with the original script to pronounce the source language reasonably accurately. Such romanizations follow the principle of phonemic transcription and attempt to render the significant sounds (phonemes) of the original as faithfully as possible in the target language. The popular Hepburn romanization of Japanese is an example of a transcriptive romanization designed for English speakers. Phonetic A phonetic conversion goes one step further and attempts to depict all phones in the source language, sacrificing legibility if necessary by using characters or conventions not found in the target script. The International Phonetic Alphabet is the most common system of phonetic transcription. Tradeoffs For most language pairs, building a usable romanization involves tradeoffs between the two extremes. Pure transcriptions are generally not possible, as the source language usually contains sounds and distinctions not found in the target language, but which must be shown to for the romanized form to be comprehensible. In general, outside a limited audience of scholars, romanizations tend to lean more towards transcription. As an example, consider the Japanese martial art 柔術: the Nihon-shiki romanization zyūzyutu may allow someone who knows Japanese to reconstruct the kana syllables じゅうじゅつ, but most people would find it easier to guess the pronunciation from the Hepburn version, jūjutsu. Arabic For more detail, see Arabic transliteration The Arabic alphabet is used to write Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. Romanization standards include: Hebrew For more details, see Hebrew alphabet and Romanization of Hebrew. Brahmic scripts The Brahmic family of abugidas is used for languages of the Indian subcontinent and south-east Asia. There is a long tradition in the west to study Sanskrit and other Indic texts in Latin transliteration. Various transliteration conventions have been used for Indic scripts since the time of Sir William Jones. A comparison of some of them is provided here: * See also: Romanization of Sanskrit, Romanization of Malayalam. Chinese Romanization of Chinese, in particular, has proved a very difficult problem, although the issue is further complicated by political considerations. Another complication is the fact that Mandarin is perceived to be written non-phonetically, and this myth has retarded acceptance of romanisation efforts. See Chinese romanization for further info. Because of this, many romanization tables contain Chinese characters plus one or more romanizations or Zhuyin. See also: * * Standard Mandarin Mainland China Taiwan Standard Cantonese Min Nan Min Dong Japanese Romanization (or, more generally, Roman letters) is called "rōmaji" in Japanese. The most common systems are: Korean Main article: Korean romanization While romanization is often been carried out irrespective of any system, there are some rulesets available to choose from: What is called MR may in many cases be any of a number of systems that differ from each other and from the original MR mostly in whether word endings are separated from the stem by a space, a hyphen or – according to McCune's and Reischauer's system – not at all; and if a hyphen or space is used, whether sound change is reflected in a stem's last and an ending's first consonant letter (e.g. pur-i vs. pul-i). Although mostly irrelevant when transcribing uninflected words, these aberrations are so widespread that any mention of "McCune-Reischauer romanization" may not necessarily refer to the original system as published in the 1930s. Several problems with MR led to the development of the newer systems: Thai Thai, spoken in Thailand, is written with its own script, probably descended from Old Khmer, in the Brahmic family. Also see Thai alphabet. Cyrillic In linguistics, scientific transliteration is used for both Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets. This applies to Old Church Slavonic, as well as modern Slavic languages which use these alphabets. Belarusian See also: Belarusian Latin alphabet Bulgarian The official Bulgarian scheme for the Roman transliteration of Bulgarian Cyrillic is the English-oriented Streamlined System proposed by L.L. Ivanov and introduced by the Antarctic Place-names Commission of Bulgaria on 2 March 1995. The Streamlined System was subsequently adopted by the Bulgarian Government (Ordinances In the USA and Britain, the US Board on Geographic Names (BGN) and the UK Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use (PCGN) still retain their 1952 BGN/PCGN System for the Romanization of Bulgarian, used primarily in the English spelling of Bulgarian geographical names. That system differs from the Streamlined System in the case of three Cyrillic letters. See also Romanization of Bulgarian. Russian There is no single universally accepted system of writing Russian using the Latin script — in fact there are a huge number of such systems: some are adjusted for a particular target language (e.g. German or French), some are designed as a librarian's transliteration, some are prescribed for Russian traveller's passports; the transcription of some names is purely traditional. All this has resulted in great reduplication of names. E.g. the name of the great Russian composer Tchaikovsky may also be written as Tchaykovsky, Tchajkovskij, Tchaikowski, Tschaikowski, Czajkowski, Čajkovskij, Čajkovski, Chajkovskij, Chaykovsky, Chaykovskiy, Chaikovski, Tshaikovski, Tšaikovski etc. Systems include: Ukrainian Ukrainian personal names are usually transcribed phonetically; see the main article section Conventional romanization of proper names. The Ukrainian National system is used for geographic names in Ukraine. Greek Greek language includes the modern language spoken in Greece, as well as ancient Polytonic orthography. See also Greeklish. English Overview and summary The chart below shows the most common phonemic transcription romanization used for several different alphabets. While it is sufficient for many casual users, there are multiple alternatives used for each alphabet, and many exceptions. For details, consult each of the language sections below. (Because the number of Hangul characters are prohibitively large, only the first characters are provided in the following table.)
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