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Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years

japantimes.co.jp

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Re: Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years

#21

Post by bitwize »

yorwba wrote: post #12
laborcontract wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not parent. This article is either terribly written or horribly translated. The captions in the photos don’t match what said in the text and aren’t logically consistent across the article.

It is perfectly logically consistent. Picture of Shibuya Station's glowing sign. Caption: "the famous Tokyo shopping district known worldwide as Shibuya will be changed in its official presentation from Sibuya" Currently, Shibuya is officially supposed to be romanized as Sibuya, but in common usage including signage it is written Shibuya. "Amid concern the divide between official rules and common usage is causing con…

It's logically consistent, but clunky to read and prone to misunderstanding. I had to read over it a couple of times to understand, are they changing from Sibuya to Shibuya or the other way around?

As an example of text written by native English speakers that has these properties of being entirely logically consistent but clunky and difficult to understand, see the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Re: Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years

#22

Post by laborcontract »

yorwba wrote: post #12
laborcontract wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not parent. This article is either terribly written or horribly translated. The captions in the photos don’t match what said in the text and aren’t logically consistent across the article.

It is perfectly logically consistent. Picture of Shibuya Station's glowing sign. Caption: "the famous Tokyo shopping district known worldwide as Shibuya will be changed in its official presentation from Sibuya" Currently, Shibuya is officially supposed to be romanized as Sibuya, but in common usage including signage it is written Shibuya. "Amid concern the divide between official rules and common usage is causing con…

It may technically be logically consistent, but nobody writes this way: “meaning, for example, the official spelling of the central Japan prefecture of Aichi will replace Aiti.”

This reads that the official spelling is currently Aichi.

The Shibuya sentence is very awkward as well.

Re: Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years

#24

Post by gpvos »

yorwba wrote: post #12
laborcontract wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not parent. This article is either terribly written or horribly translated. The captions in the photos don’t match what said in the text and aren’t logically consistent across the article.

It is perfectly logically consistent. Picture of Shibuya Station's glowing sign. Caption: "the famous Tokyo shopping district known worldwide as Shibuya will be changed in its official presentation from Sibuya" Currently, Shibuya is officially supposed to be romanized as Sibuya, but in common usage including signage it is written Shibuya. "Amid concern the divide between official rules and common usage is causing con…

The use of "from" instead of "to" is confusing. I had to read those lines again after figuring out halfway the article what the actual direction was.

Re: Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years

#25

Post by downvotetruth »

lmm wrote: post #14

Sign of the worldwide dominance of English, sadly. Hepburn is utter nonsense if your native language is e.g. German or Irish - but it's popular with English monoglots who believe that their peculiar use of the Latin alphabet is somehow objectively correct, and they seem to be in ascendence these days.

The Latin alphabet does not include J, U, and W, but the English alphabet does (see "Shinjuku") and this would likely be better understood as a form of Japanese spelling reform rather than "Romanization".

Re: Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years

#26

Post by lmm »

zaik wrote: post #20
lmm wrote: post #14

Sign of the worldwide dominance of English, sadly. Hepburn is utter nonsense if your native language is e.g. German or Irish - but it's popular with English monoglots who believe that their peculiar use of the Latin alphabet is somehow objectively correct, and they seem to be in ascendence these days.

My native language is German and Hepburn is much closer to the correct pronunciation than Kunreishiki.

Really? German "ti" isn't super close to ち, but I found writing it "chi" just completely bizarre.

Re: Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years

#27

Post by lmm »

downvotetruth wrote: post #25
lmm wrote: post #14

Sign of the worldwide dominance of English, sadly. Hepburn is utter nonsense if your native language is e.g. German or Irish - but it's popular with English monoglots who believe that their peculiar use of the Latin alphabet is somehow objectively correct, and they seem to be in ascendence these days.

The Latin alphabet does not include J, U, and W, but the English alphabet does (see "Shinjuku") and this would likely be better understood as a form of Japanese spelling reform rather than "Romanization".

> The Latin alphabet does not include J, U, and W, but the English alphabet does (see "Shinjuku")

Japanese does not naturally include distinct U/V letters and does not have a first-class concept that needs to be written with a J; the official way to romanize that place name is "Sinzyuku" and that's morally equivalent to a traditional-Latin "SINZYVKV". W does exist but is decidedly second-class and declining (only the "Wa" sound is really heard any more; I suspect it will go the way of obsolete phonemes like "Ye" and "We" soon enough).

> this would likely be better understood as a form of Japanese spelling reform rather than "Romanization".

It makes no sense as a way of spelling Japanese. It's about standardising on anglicising Japanese instead of romanising it.

Re: Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years

#28

Post by bitwize »

I recognize Kunrei-shiki as the style used in Eleanor Harz Jorden's seminal Japanese textbook, Japanese: The Spoken Language. I always thought Hepburn style was more appropriate for the goals of that book: to convey spoken Japanese in a way understandable to English speakers. But I think Jorden intended for accompanying audio materials to supply a pronunciation guide. (My Japanese professor was a native speaker, and so used her own voice, not audio materials accompanying the textbook.)

Re: Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years

#29

Post by adastra22 »

laborcontract wrote: post #22
yorwba wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is perfectly logically consistent. Picture of Shibuya Station's glowing sign. Caption: "the famous Tokyo shopping district known worldwide as Shibuya will be changed in its official presentation from Sibuya" Currently, Shibuya is officially supposed to be romanized as Sibuya, but in common usage including signage it is written Shibuya. "Amid concern the divide between official rules and common usage is causing con…

It may technically be logically consistent, but nobody writes this way: “meaning, for example, the official spelling of the central Japan prefecture of Aichi will replace Aiti.” This reads that the official spelling is currently Aichi. The Shibuya sentence is very awkward as well.

“Aichi will replace Aiti” seems pretty clear to me.

Re: Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years

#30

Post by swatson741 »

The switch to Hepburn rules is reasonable since it's the de facto style of romanization but, if they were going to go thru this sort of effort to revise their written language it seems disappointing that they wouldn't add stress marks / accent marks to their romanization.

It especially makes sense in Japanese to remove ambiguity like, 港南. Konan, naively in Hepburn. But is it Kon-an or Ko-nan? Kònan removes ambiguity.

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