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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

#61

Post by swatson741 »

Hamuko wrote: post #49
swatson741 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> When ん comes before a vowel or y in the same word, put an apostrophe after the n > ほんい hon’i > ほんやく hon’yaku http://park.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/eigo/UT-Komaba-Romanization-of... Also, where the hell did you learn your Hepburn?

I used the Genki books which also use Hepburn. Simply put Hepburn mimics the English language and, the English language uses apostrophes for glottal stops. Especially if the language foreign. This is why Genki does that.

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

#62

Post by SllX »

Hamuko wrote: post #16
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.

I imagine they assume a reader knows what the Hepburn and Kunrei-siki are.

Kind of. The Japan Times is interesting. It's an English-language publication, but it is written for Japanese people by Japanese people. Despite their target audience being Japanese people, the fact that it is an English-language publication kind of makes it a default paper (well, figurative paper) of record for what's going on in Japan for people outside of Japan that don't really speak Japanese.

They also make textbooks for Japanese-language learners.

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

#63

Post by fenomas »

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #59

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…

This is basically a case of the government removing a rule that almost nobody, including them, was really following. I guess they had it written down somewhere to use Kunrei, but like TFA says Hepburn is what's used virtually everywhere.

So, whatever system one might expect ought to be truer to the source language, the Anglicized system is the one that current native speakers find most familiar.

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

#64

Post by PreachSoup »

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…

> If you want to see the opposite approach, look at China and Pinyin. It’s made pronunciation of Chinese in English and elsewhere less intuitive. In order to pronounce Chinese words properly you need to learn Pinyin and its phonetic rules. As a result, many Chinese people take on Westernized names to avoid the inevitable butchering, which is a bit of a shame.

Taiwanese romanization is way better. It's much closer to English and more readable

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

#65

Post by brazzy »

em-bee wrote: post #54
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 i…

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

Certainly not worse than Kunrei-shiki. Hepburn might not be a great match to non-English languages, but it'S still a better one.

If you disagree, show me one language whose speakers would naturally pronounce "Sinzyuku" correctly.

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

#66

Post by samus »

lmm wrote: post #60
samus wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

In short, it seems to make the Latin alphabet work for Japanese. Perfectly fine if Japan uses it as its Latin-based writing system (discarding the native ones), or to transcribe it for academic usage, but unhelpful as a Romanization, which is mostly intended to make it easier for people completely unfamiliar with the language to pronounce names and to learn the language.

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

#67

Post by fenomas »

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.

There are several variations of Hepburn, but none of them uses an apostrophe for small-tsu consonants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepburn_romanization

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

#68

Post by mytailorisrich »

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…

Chinese people take Western names because Chinese are very flexible and, especially, because the Chinese naming system is quite alien to Westerners.

There is also the issue of tones, which is the major hurdle for Westerners.

Now as to "you need to learn pinyin and it's rules". Yes, you need to learn and make some effort to pronounce a foreign language. The same goes for any language and it is unavoidable.

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

#69

Post by resolutebat »

Hamuko wrote: post #51
resolutebat wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Right you are! Clearly we need to join forces for a root vegetable safety plan: 根安案 kon'an'an.

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

#70

Post by [deleted] »

brazzy wrote: post #65
em-bee wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> sure, maybe for english speakers an english based transliteration might be better. but i'd argue that makes it worse for everyone else. Certainly not worse than Kunrei-shiki. Hepburn might not be a great match to non-English languages, but it'S still a better one. If you disagree, show me one language whose speakers would naturally pronounce "Sinzyuku" correctly.

[deleted]
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