[KS] Romanization systems

[Richard Miller]

Hi Stefan,

Regarding your question about siot no longer romanized as sh only before wi,
I don't believe this is an "official" change in M-R. The Library of
Congress, for example, in its 15-page explanation of Korean romanization
(http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization/korean.pdf) takes the original
M-R paper as its base, and follows the original rule in spite of being
biased toward pronunciation (in the Seoul dialect, of course) rather than
han'gul orthography. Thus, even though everyone I know who has studied
Korean as a second language (whether originally an English speaker, a
Japanese speaker, or even a 1.5-generation Korean American) hears "sinla"
(the kingdom) as "shilla," LOC renders it without the h ("silla").

At one point, the Korea Journal published its own M-R-based romanization
table, which functioned as a reference tool for some time. You might check
that to see how they treated the mystery of H--I don't have it in front of
me. If I remember correctly, they printed one in the late 1980s or early
1990s, which would be after the 1984 South Korean romanization.

Richard Miller
University of Wisconsin-Madison
http://mywebspace.wisc.edu/rcmiller/web/