성(姓)씨로 본 한국어로마자표기 반성

A Critical Evaluation of the Current Romanization System in the Respect of Romanized Korean Family Names: Regulation of Reductionism vs. Reality of Holism

Korean Romanization was devised to work as an interface between Korean and those who do not know Hangul. The foreign visitors who do not understand Korean should rely on the Romanized Korean until they get used to Korean. In foreign environment, when Koreans should introduce themselves to the others, the first thing to do is to make their identities recognized with Romanized names. Due to this importance, Korean Romanization was enacted early in 1948. Since then, it has been revised three times in 1959, 1984 and 2000, for the last time. However, recent surveys show that despite these efforts, the gap between the regulation and the real usage in Romanized Korean names is far from being narrowed. The estimation that only 13% have followed the rules is tantamount to that almost every Korean has never cared for the regulation in writing their names in roman characters. Why this happened? To solve this puzzle, we hypothesized that the current Romanization system, so-called Revised Romanization, and the Romanized Korean names observed are based on two quite different approaches--reductionism and holism. The former appears to have taken the road of first establishing a general one-to-one relationship between Korean consonants and vowels and English alphabet and later assembling the Romanized Korean constants and vowels into words. However, the latter looks to have pursued the route of first searching for the English words sounding similar to the Korean ones and analyzing their relationship phonetically and later applying what was found out to the other Romanizations through various forms of analogies, which reminds us of the early stage of language acquisition by children. We proved the hypothesis by showing that the Romanized expressions of the 20 most popular Korean family names could be attributed to the 1,000 most frequently used English words. The finding suggests that to match romanization to reality, we should lessen its aspect of reductionism and increase that of holism, if another revision attempt is allowed.