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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

#51

Post by Hamuko »

resolutebat wrote: post #42
swatson741 wrote: post #30

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.

There's no ambiguity: in Hepburn, Konan is always "Ko-nan", you'd need to write it Kon'an if you wanted "Kon-an". Which is also unlikely in Japanese, unless you're writing about root vegetable safety 根案 or something. If anything, using stress marks would be worse, because Japanese is (slightly) tonal and accents are on rare occasion used to mark them: háshi vs hashí.

Wouldn't root vegetable safety be 根安?

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

#52

Post by timr »

swatson741 wrote: post #47
Hamuko wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you supposed to write out こんあん as "kon'an" and not "konan" with Hepburn? きんいろ => kin'iro きにろ => kiniro

Hepburn doesn't use the apostrophe for that. The apostrophe is for words with a glottal stop like ze'tai. Or without an apostrophe as zettai is possible too.

zettai is not a glottal stop. Not sure what the term is, but it's a fricative of some sort. You're stopping the flow of air with your tongue on the back of your teeth.

A glottal stop is like "uh oh", where you stop the air with your glottis.

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

#53

Post by resolutebat »

timr wrote: post #38
swatson741 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You basically still have the same problem tho. Is it Ko-un-an or Kou-nan? Without accent marks it's unclear without already knowing.

No, because you never separately voice consecutive vowels in Japanese. There's no such thing as a glottal stop. Tone aside, "kounan" is pronounced as a native English speaker would pronounce the word.

Incorrect on both counts. 追う ou "to chase" is a simple example of separately pronounced consecutive vowels.

港南, on the other hand, does not have a "u" sound of any kind, it's simply a long "ō", which doesn't really exist in English. The reason it's occasionally spelled with a "u" (although not in any formal standard) is because hiragana uses the letter う to indicate long o and u.

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

#54

Post by em-bee »

speak_plainly wrote: post #37

I think this makes sense given the prominence and place English holds in the world. Hepburn has made Japanese more accessible universally given its phonetic nature and relationship to English. There are many other transliteration systems out there that people are using with their local languages as well. If you want to see the opposite approach, look at China and Pinyin. It’s made pronunciation of Chinese in English…

that seems like a very anglocentric viewpoint.

sure, maybe for english speakers an english based transliteration might be better. but i'd argue that makes it worse for everyone else.

given how irregular english pronunciation is, i find that a transliteration system is better if it is based on languages with more regular pronunciation of letters.

i don't see how chinese pinyin creates any more hurdles for foreigners in china than say german does for foreigners in germany. (to be fair, i am fluent in both english and german, so maybe i am not a good judge for this)

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

#55

Post by samus »

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.

Hepburn is not equal to the English spelling rules though, which are rife with inconsistencies and exceptions. Even though it doesn't match with how many language's version of the Latin alphabet works, and one might object to that, Hepburn an effective tool to get the job done. English learners wish that the rules of English orthography were that consistent!

If one's goal is to travel to Japan or to research their culture, knowledge of Japanese and/or English is required anyways. In the latter case, one will be positively surprised that there are only a few rules specific to Japanese to be learned to be able to read with some degree of accuracy.

One might object to the dominance of English as a lingua franca, but actually any other languages being the lingua franca would dominate the Romanization system as well, and that would lead to similar issues for speakers whose writing system works differently.

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

#56

Post by lmm »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #44
speak_plainly wrote: post #37

I think this makes sense given the prominence and place English holds in the world. Hepburn has made Japanese more accessible universally given its phonetic nature and relationship to English. There are many other transliteration systems out there that people are using with their local languages as well. If you want to see the opposite approach, look at China and Pinyin. It’s made pronunciation of Chinese in English…

I mean it probably helps that few, if any Japanese sounds are alien to English speakers. I've studied some Japanese, been several times, can't remember any sounds that were particularly difficult (whereas Japanese speakers definitely struggle with some English sounds, like "th" and "l"). There are intonation aspects that are hard for (native) English speakers, and the syllable speed is higher than English, but the ba…

つ is an unnatural sound for at least some English speakers, and can be hard to distinguish from す. The short/long vowel distinction is also completely alien at first (e.g. people are mostly familiar with the pronunciation of Tōkyō, but the natural reading of "Tokyo" in English would be quite different, starting with a "tock" sound).

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

#57

Post by brazzy »

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 you're wrong.

Hepburn may not be an ideal match for German, but it's still a better one than Kunrei-shiki. I'm fairly sure there is no language in the world whose pronunciation of Latin letters matches the latter (hah!).

The only thing Kunrei-shiki has going for it is that it's more regular and can be more easily matched to kana. It's easier for Japanese kids to learn. But they are not the ones who are going to use it primarily.

You could use different romanization systems for each foreign language, and there are some (there is one for German where あいち is "Aitschi"), but that doesn't end up serving anyone well in a globalized world with an Internet.

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

#58

Post by timr »

resolutebat wrote: post #53
timr wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because you never separately voice consecutive vowels in Japanese. There's no such thing as a glottal stop. Tone aside, "kounan" is pronounced as a native English speaker would pronounce the word.

Incorrect on both counts. 追う ou "to chase" is a simple example of separately pronounced consecutive vowels. 港南, on the other hand, does not have a "u" sound of any kind, it's simply a long "ō", which doesn't really exist in English. The reason it's occasionally spelled with a "u" (although not in any formal standard) is because hiragana uses the letter う to indicate long o and u.

My point was that you do not pronounce that word as "oh u". There's no glottal stop, nor are the vowels "separated". But I agree it's not a familiar concept to English speakers, nor is it easily expressed in romaji. If I were explaining it to a native English speaker who didn't know Japanese at all, I'd tell them to say "owe"...but that's not hepburn.

> 港南, on the other hand, does not have a "u" sound of any kind, it's simply a long "ō", which doesn't really exist in English.

Yes, that was exactly my point. It's a long vowel. The closest approximation in English is not "ko", but "kou".

I disagree that this isn't in English, however. It's an easy concept to map -- we have tons of repeated vowels -- which is why "kounan" gets the pronunciation pretty close.

Directly addressing the question I was responding to, there's no question about "ko un an" vs. "kou nan", because the former requires you to stop the airflow between the "ko" and "un" in a way that isn't natural for Japanese. Knowing that consecutive vowels will essentially always "smoosh together" allows you to pronounce the word -- so long as you know the vowel is long.

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

#59

Post by ChrisArchitect »

Interesting writeup(s) about the popular culture reasons and the more concrete technical reasons for the change.

Curious though of this move to more English-favoring mode when it seems in recent years in other countries as far as naming etc there was a move away from English/colonial/etc naming of places etc like Kiev to Kyiv (sorry that one's from Russian), and like places in India awhile back.... Similarly more use of Indigenous naming etc just off top of my head. I suppose that's formal naming and not language constructs but still.

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

#60

Post by lmm »

samus wrote: post #55
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.

Hepburn is not equal to the English spelling rules though, which are rife with inconsistencies and exceptions. Even though it doesn't match with how many language's version of the Latin alphabet works, and one might object to that, Hepburn an effective tool to get the job done. English learners wish that the rules of English orthography were that consistent! If one's goal is to travel to Japan or to research their cu…

> One might object to the dominance of English as a lingua franca, but actually any other languages being the lingua franca would dominate the Romanization system as well

Kunreisiki is not a system dominated by any particular lingua franca; it's a system that directly reflects Japanese ways of writing Japanese. One could imagine e.g. a Spanish-influenced romanization system that would represent the は-line in a way that corresponded to Spanish orthography becoming popular in a world that was dominated by Spanish as a lingua franca, and that would have the same problems that Hepburn does. But Kunreisiki really is "neutral" in that sense.

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