Why does North Koreans use the McCune-Reischauer Romanization system in writing the Korean Language?
This is still a problem in South Korea to be honest. I have been living here for almost 20 months and what has happened is that the old system, McCune-Reischauer has been around longer but due to complexities in writing the symbols on a normal keyboard without special characters it lost popularity. The new system is newer and does not use the marks so it’s supposed to be easier. However, everyone already uses their transcribed names as they were given in the old system. So there are two standards and others that people just use because they’re trying to spell it out phonetically when they do not know the standard. Everything new that I see printed in South Korea is generally written with the new system, but company names and old things in books are using the M-R system. My guess is that they’re sufficiently behind so that they haven’t even attempted a conversion from the older to the newer… Or there are Western influences that have caused the South to use the new one, influences that
