hangul-names 0.4.2

Korean script (Hangul) has used various notations over the years to be converted to latin (Roman) characters. The currently used official system for normal words is Revised Romanization (RR), which eliminated ambiguity in the old system McCune–Reischauer (McR). McR uses accented characters to denote differences in pronounciation. Accented characters were commonly not used in internet communications as they are hard to type and/or not well supported in fonts. Over the years font support has improved tremendously, but keyboard support is still flunky.

The lack of accents caused ambiguity in romanized words and people had to guess from the context what the writer meant (yo and yŏ were both spelled as yo). The Revised Romanization system uses plain characters from the ASCII range to denote the differences in pronounciation for example through the use of multi-letter vowels (yeo instead of yŏ).

However, for people’s names (famous or not), the rules are bent, because people are used to a certain romanization of their name and have traditionally not strictly adhered to one system or another. The classical example is that the surname 김 is always romanized to Kim, whereas RR dictates Gim.

This library contains a set of rules that can be implemented to deviate from RR notation using transliteration definitions and succession rules. It was inspired by the author’s work on Dramawiki, which uses a documented set of prefences, so that people with the same name in Hangul script, end up romanized exactly the same. Since Dramawiki aims to support English readers it didn’t make sense to create pages with titles written in Hangul.