McCune-Reischauer
McCune-Reischauer is a romanization system of the Korean language, created in 1937 by two Americansns: George M. McCune and Edwin O. Reischauer. It does not attempt to transliterate Hangŭl; but rather to represent the phonetic pronunciation. North Korea and many Western countries use this system while South Korea replaced it with a new romanization system that was created by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the Revised Romanization of Korean. A third system—the Yale romanization system, which is a one-to-one transliteration system—exists, but is only used in academic literature, especially in linguistics. During the period of Russian interest in Korea at the beginning of the 20th century, attempts were also made at representing Korean in Cyrillic.The McCune-Reischauer system is basically friendly to Westerners. For example, Korean has phonologically no distinction between voiced and voiceless consonants, but it phonetically distinguishes them. Aspirated consonants like "p' ", "b' ", and "t' " are distinguished by apostrophe from unaspirated ones, which is intuitive to Westerners. The apostrophe is also used to disambiguate syllables (jŏn'gŭm vs. jŏng'ŭm).
Critics of the McCune-Reischauer system claim that casual users of the system omit the breves over the o for 어 and the u for 으, because typing o or u without the breves is often easier than adding them. This, in turn, can lead to confusion over whether the o being Romanized is 오 or 어 or the u being Romanized is 우 or 으. Casual users also often omit the apostrophe that differentiates aspirated consonants (ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅍ, and ㅊ) from their unaspirated counterparts (ㄱ, ㄷ, ㅂ, and ㅈ), which can also lead to confusion.
Such common omissions were the primary reason the South Korean government adopted a revised system of Romanization in 2000. Critics of the revised system claim it fails to represent 어 and 으 in an easily recognizable way, and that it misrepresents the unaspirated consonants as they are actually pronounced. Defenders of the McCune-Reischauer system, however, respond that a casual user unfamiliar with Korean can easily approximate actual pronunciation of Korean names or words even when breves and apostrophes are omitted, although it is still best to include them.
Meanwhile, despite official adoption of the new system in South Korea, the Korean Studies community, both in and out of South Korea, generally continues to use the McCune-Reischauer system, as do North Korea and many international geographic and cartographic conventions. Even within South Korea, usage of the new system is less than universal (as was the case when McCune-Reishauer was the official Romanization system).
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