Romanization of Korean

MR is almost universally used in academic Korean studies, and a variant of it has been the official system of North Korea since 1992.

Due to a number of factors, including the properties of the Korean language and alphabet, as well as social and geopolitical issues, a single settled standard did not emerge.

It was the first to use the digraphs eo and eu,[6][9] and the first to use diacritics for Korean romanization; it used the grave and acute accents over the letter "e".

[13] In 1935, Jeong In-seop [ko] published "The International Phonetic Transcription of Korean Speech Sounds".

This led to significant diversity and inconsistencies in romanizations, not only between scholars but reportedly even within the writings of individual authors.

[20] Also, in many cases, pronunciation does not exactly match what is written in Hangul; similar phenomena occurs with all other major scripts as well.

For example, due to linguistic assimilation, the state Silla is written in Korean as 신라 (sin-la), but pronounced sil-la.

[13] Regardless of romanization systems, many Koreans chose and continue to choose to spell their names in Latin script in an ad hoc manner.

[22] McCune–Reischauer (MR) is a system that was first introduced in 1939, in the journal Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society Korea Branch.

Just after the 1950–1953 Korean War, romanization was reportedly seen as a minor concern, compared to improving domestic literacy in Hangul.

The system also tended to produce romanizations that bore superficial resemblance to words in English, some of which were seen as odd or humorous.

[28] Eventually, the South Korean government began reevaluating the use of the system in anticipation of the 1988 Summer Olympics, which were to be held in Seoul.

Some South Koreans reportedly had negative reactions to the system, which they viewed as confusing and overly beholden to pronunciation.

[33] On July 7, 2000, the NAKL and Ministry of Culture and Tourism announced that South Korea would adopt a new system: Revised Romanization (RR).

[3] Road signs and textbooks were required to follow these rules as soon as possible, at a cost estimated by the government to be at least US$500–600 million.

Some words written in the Soviet Latin alphabet: gu lli, nongdhion haggio, nong ʙ, zængsan, gugga diaʙondiyi.