South Korea respelled its road signs so the internet could stop mangling Korean
The older way of writing Korean in Latin letters relied on apostrophes and curved accent marks, which early internet users routinely dropped, making different sounds look identical. Ahead of the 2002 World Cup, South Korea adopted a system using only the plain 26 letters, then spent hundreds of billions of won replacing signs across the country.
The National Academy of the Korean Language began work on Revised Romanization in 1995, and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism proclaimed it on 7 July 2000. It replaced the McCune–Reischauer system, which told aspirated consonants apart only by an apostrophe and certain vowels only by a breve mark. Strip those symbols out and pairs such as the plain and aspirated k, or the vowels ŏ and o, collapsed into the same spelling. The new scheme writes the plain consonants as g, d, b and j and the aspirated ones as k, t, p and ch, while the troublesome vowels become eo and eu.
Its main job is proper names: places, people and companies. Words are usually respelled according to how they sound, so the Seoul landmark whose letters suggest Dokripmun becomes Dongnimmun. Personal names are an exception and keep their written form. A consonant can change according to position: the Korean liquid is r before a vowel and l elsewhere, which is why one island is Ulleungdo and a county is Cheorwon. Final g, d and b turn into k, t and p because they are cut off unreleased.
Hyphens are mandatory only before administrative units, as in Pyeongchang-gun, and are left out of natural features, so the mountain is Seoraksan rather than Seorak-san. The National Institute of Korean Language discourages optional ones, arguing that hyphens clutter the eye and that no spelling perfectly shows pronunciation, just as English spells lead the metal and lead the verb the same way. For academic work needing a reversible code, a letter-by-letter variant exists, turning the word for independence into doglib instead of dongnip.
Road signs, rail and subway maps were converted at an estimated cost of 500 billion to 600 billion won, and textbooks, maps and heritage signs had to comply by 28 February 2002. Passports follow a looser version: the common surname often rendered Shin avoids the strict spelling Sin, which looks like an English word for wrongdoing.
Source: Revised Romanization of Korean
