In antiquity, Romanization or Latinization was also the imposition of Roman culture and language.
A Romanization or Latinization is a system for representing a word or language with the Latin alphabet, where the original word or language used 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).
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. China has literally hundreds of distinct dialects, though there is one common written language.
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.
Newman Family Academy Award Nominations for Best Song Lists times that Randy, Lionel, or Alfred were nominated for Oscars in this category, the year, the competition, and the winner. http://www.romanization.com/personal/randy/bestsong.html
Newman Family Academy Award Nominations for Best Score Lists times that Randy, Lionel, Alfred, David, or Thomas were nominated for Oscars in this category, the year, the competition, and the winner. http://www.romanization.com/personal/randy/bestscore.html
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