As you probably know already, Korean uses a different alphabet than we do, hangul. How to romanize (i.e. transliterate into latin characters) has been debated. When Western countries were colonizers, either direct or indirect, they transliterated all names according to their own pronounciation. For instance they called the Indian garment “saree”, because that’s the closest pronounciation for an English-speaking person. Whereas for a French, Italian or German person, the two E s don’t sound like this at all. Nowadays everyone writes “sari”.
Same in Korea. The very well known Korean surname, Lee, is an effort to render what today would be transcribed as I or maybe Yi, as there is no L at all in front of the vowel.
At some point, a system was made, which tried to take into account the real pronounciation and used lots of little symbols called diacritics. These were useful for scholars, but of course no normal person could type that!
Aaaanyway, in 2000 there has been something called Revised Romanization, which tried to rationalize all this. You can read about it here.
It’s a pretty good system, if not perfect, because it takes into account only the actual characters written, and not their pronounciation (for instance, the fact that b at the beginning of the word is pronounced “p” and g aat the beginning of the word is pronounced “k”)
There are many rules, but the government said that, regarding names, people were free to keep the way they had been writing their names before if they wished.
That’s why you still see Lee and Park instead of I and Bak. Especially for passports, if one already had a passport and had travelled abroad, it would be very difficult to change the spelling of his name, although the government encourages new passport holders to adopt the new system.
Names made only of one vowel have the risk of being confused for a typo or ignored, in writing. That’s why some people add an H or something, to make them at least two words. The surname O is also written Oh. And, still, they are slaves to the English language. For instance the surname An is written Ahn, to help an English person pronounce it easily (and not like the indefinite article “an”)
In conclusion, there is not a right and wrong way for names. If you go to Viki’s pages for celebrities, you will see two or three versions of the person’s name!
As for hyphens… In the linked Wikipedia article it says:
It is permitted to hyphenate syllables in the given name, following common practice.
Yes, the hyphened version makes sense, because the name becomes more unique, easier to remember and it’s clearer for foreigners which part is the name and which part is the surname.
On Viki, a long time ago, volunteers made a poll and agreed to not use the hyphen, because they were too lazy to type it. Or at least that’s the reason I was given, because that happened before I came here.
So there. You learned probably more than you wanted to know.