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In antiquity, Romanization was also the imposing of Roman culture and language.
A Romanization or Latinization is a system for representing a language with the Latin alphabet, where these typically use a writing system other than the Roman alphabet. Three methods may be used to carry out Romanization: transliteration, transcription and phonemic conversion. Each Romanization has its own set of rules for pronunciation of the
Romanized words.
To romanize is to transcribe or transliterate a language into the Roman alphabet. This process is most
commonly associated with the Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages (CJK).
(The similar process of representing a language using the Cyrillic
alphabet may be named Cyrillization.)
Some languages have more than one system of Romanization; Mandarin, for example, has several, including Wade-Giles, Yale, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, MPS II, Postal System Pinyin, Tongyong Pinyin, and Hanyu pinyin; and Cantonese has Jyutping,
penkyamp, Gwohngdongwaa pengyam, Sidney Lau, Barnett-Chao, Meyer-Wempe, EFEO, and Yale.
In Mainland China, Hanyu Pinyin has been used officially for
decades, primarily as a linguistic tool for teaching the official Mandarin variant of Chinese to students whose mother tongue is not Mandarin. The Roman alphabet is used to commonalise the
pronunciation of Mandarin words, since Chinese characters
describe only things and concepts, and provide no pronunciation information. China has literally hundreds of distinct dialects, though there is one common written language.
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Romanization in Japanese is called "Romaji". Common systems include Hepburn and Kunrei-shiki, which is also known as ISO
3602, the system approved by ISO.
Main article: Korean romanization
Until 2002, the official system in South Korea was the McCune-Reischauer system, which is still used in North Korea. Today, South Korea officially uses the revised version of Romanization that was
approved in 2000. Road signs and textbooks are required to follow these rules as soon as
possible, at a cost estimated by the government to be at least US$20 million. Proper names are still left to personal preference,
but the government encourages using the new system. A third system—the Yale Romanization system—is used mainly in academic literature. During the period of Russian
interest in Korea at the beginning of the 20th century, attempts were also made at representing Korean in Cyrillic.
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, Czajkowski,
Čajkovskij, Čajkovski, Chajkovskij, Chaykovsky, Chaykovskiy,
Chaikovski etc.
The Belarusian language has been written with both Cyrillic and Latin scripts. Today the Latin script
(Łacinka or Łacinica) is rarely used (although it has its advocates). Still it would seem that
Belarusian has already a native romanization system, so we need not to invent anything. However, usually Belarusian names
are transcribed differently, using a system like that for the Russian language. Names are then changed like this: Homiel
→ Homyel', Mahiloŭ → Mahilyow, Viciebsk → Vitsebsk, Baranavičy → Baranavichy,
Žytkavičy → Zhytkavichy etc.
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