It's always sad to learn of a language becoming extinct. The latest one to come to my attention is Manchu, the language of the founders of the Chinese Qing dynasty. This article in the NY Times is interesting and there's a video linked of a woman speaking Manchu. Wikipedia has some more information in its article on the language, and the Manchu script looks interesting, too. A Prussian linguist, Paul Georg von Möllendorff, did early work on Manchu. His picture in the article is of him in a native Korean outfit.

Oh, that is sad. I had just posted about another language dying recently.

I had expected the Manchu characters to look more like Chinese than they do. In that Wikipedia article (and pardon my ignorance!), what does it mean to create a system for "romanizing" a language?

what does it mean to create a system for "romanizing" a language?

Romanization is to devise a system for writing the language using the Latin (or Roman) alphabet.

The cover of the Mongolian version of Tintin in Tibet has some Classical Mongolian, which is the script that Manchu is based on. (The rest of the book is in Cyrillic.)