 mccuneâreischauer romanization is one of the two most widely used korean language romanization systems, along with the revised romanization of korean, which replaced (a modified) mccuneâreischauer as the official romanization system in south korea in 2000. a variant of mccuneâreischauer is used as the official system in north korea. the system was created in 1937 by two americans, george m. mccune and edwin o. reischauer. with a few exceptions, it does not attempt to transliterate korean text but rather to represent the phonetic pronunciation. mccuneâreischauer is widely used outside of korea. a variant of it was used as the official romanization system in south korea from 1984 to 2000. a third system &mdash; the yale romanization system, which is a transliteration system &mdash; exists, but is used only 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. == characteristics and criticism == the mccuneâreischauer system is friendly to westerners. for example, korean has phonologically no distinction between voiced and voiceless consonants, but it phonetically distinguishes them. aspirated consonants like "p' ", "k' ", and "t' " are distinguished by apostrophe from unaspirated ones, which may be falsely understood as a separator between syllables (as in  â twich'agi, which consists of the syllables twi, ch'a and gi). the apostrophe is also used to mark transcriptions of  as opposed to :  â chan'gÅ­m vs.  â changÅ­m). critics of the mccuneâreischauer system claim that casual users of the system omit the breves ( Ë ) over the o for ì´ and the u for ì¼, 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 ì¤ or ì´ or the u being romanized is ì° or ì¼. casual users also often omit the apostrophe that differentiates aspirated consonants (ã, ã, ã, and ã) from their unaspirated counterparts (ã±, ã·, ã, and ã), which can also lead to confusion. defenders of the mccuneâreischauer system, however, respond that a casual user unfamiliar with korean can easily approximate the actual pronunciation of korean names or words even when breves and apostrophes are omitted, although it is still best to include them. such common omissions were the primary reason the south korean governme
Korean_writing_system Romanization_of_Korean