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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

#71

Post by ChainOfFools »

timr wrote: post #33
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.

Given that the "Ko" is actually pronounced "Kou" (i.e. hold the "o" sound for a beat longer), I'm not sure how the downward accent helps? The bigger thing than "kon an" vs. "ko nan", IMO, is that the romanization rules don't capture these kinds of repeated/extended vowel combinations. Honestly, anyone who is sufficiently capable in japanese to know that 港南 is something close to "Ko + nan" is going to know hiragana an…

> I'd personally love a unified syntax for tone that doesn't involve drawing squiggly lines over the word, or a number next to it, but that's a pretty specialized need, I think.)

That would be lovely and possibly and attainable goal for a minimally tonal language like Japanese, but the challenge is generalizing any such system to heavily tonal languages like Hokkien, with six or seven tonal markings and additional layers of complexity like tonality rules that depend on different word boundaries and positions.

It's a shame that different shades of ink weren't invented and/or normalized sooner, because a lot of this state space could be captured using a simple convention of two stroke weights (light/heavy) by two shades of color (red black) for every glyph.

"Rubric" was an early gesture in this direction but unfortunately never escaped its original application.

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

#72

Post by ChainOfFools »

timr wrote: post #52
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.

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.

labiodental? err, i mean interdental? or is it alveolar? I know what you mean, like pausing half a step to put a barely perceptible extra bit of mass behind the release of the 't' sound.

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

#73

Post by Hamuko »

swatson741 wrote: post #61
Hamuko wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think you have a very warped idea of how Hepburn works and your confusion is just caused by not knowing Hepburn. You would probably be better off actually looking up the rules of Hepburn instead of assuming that it's just the English language.

The Genki books seem to not use apostrophe but a dash, since I found a PDF of it and it uses the terms "on-yomi" and "kun-yomi" to distinguish んよ (n'yo / n-yo) and にょ (nyo). It also very clearly says that った becomes "tta" right in the beginning, so I have no idea where your apostrophe usage comes from.

港南 has a very unambiguous Hepburn romanisation of kōnan, which is impossible to confuse for こなん ("konan") or こんあん ("kon'an" / "kon-an").

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

#76

Post by worklaptopacct »

nbenitezl wrote: post #74

¿Romanization? But English is not a Romance language.

But it uses Roman letters which form the Latin alphabet.

Romanization here means that Japanese text gets transcribed into Roman characters. The fact that the transcription follows English phonetics is a different thing.

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

#77

Post by aidog »

Good. In practice the old system was taught in schools, but not really used officially. Except for people giving their names, where someones name is definitely pronounced as Shota, they would write it Syota. I just checked facebook and found quite a few people like this.

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

#78

Post by acadapter »

The "n" in "na" is not the same as the "n" in "ni".

However, only some consonants get this treatment, such as "sa" and "shi", because it only takes into account what a typical English speaker can distinguish.

Do they have to keep such an English-centric approach? Why not "nyi"?

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

#79

Post by baerrie »

lmm wrote: post #50
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…

> Hepburn has made Japanese more accessible universally given its phonetic nature and relationship to English. It's made Japanese more accessible to English-speakers, at the cost of making it less accessible to those from other languages, and making romanised Japanese harder for Japanese people to write, and perhaps even indirectly impeding Japanese learning of English (which is notoriously terrible) as well. This is…

How is it harder for non-English speakers? Knowing the kana pronunciation for Sinzyuku is way harder than knowing the English pronunciation of Shinjuku for most outside of JP. Also, JP schools already teach English from grade 1 onward so if anything, seeing the English transliteration aligns way better and enforces what they are already being taught. Not to mention katakana spellings and pronunciation which further confuse their learning of English. Previously you effectively had three different representations of foreign words with different spellings, this cuts it down to two which significantly decreases the cognitive overload

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

#80

Post by jinushaun »

tkgally wrote: post #32
zzo38computer wrote: post #5

Both types of romanization are meaningful in different contexts. For English pronouncing the words such as "Shinjuku", "Fukushima", "Chichibu" are better, and are better for writing Japanese names in English text in general. However, the other system, with "Sinzyuku", "Hukusima", etc is directly according to the kana by the grid order, so its use is if you need to directly correspond to such a thing.

Good point. And "Sinzyuku" and "Hukusima" not only correspond more closely to the kana; they also match most native Japanese speakers’ mental representations of the sounds. For example, most Japanese speakers perceive the し syllable as consisting of a single consonant phoneme followed by a single vowel phoneme, so si makes more intuitive sense to them than shi . And they perceive the consonants in は and ふ as being th…

I have to disagree here. Hepburn is superior unless your goal is transliteration from Roman characters to kana. From the article (which also argues against kunrei)

  > Romanized Japanese is essentially an auxiliary device — a reading aid, if you will — and not the real thing.
Romanization is for foreigners. Japanese people would read the original kana/kanji anyway

Korean went through a similar reform and I also disagree with it. Favoring transliteration (linguists and academics) over the actual sounds (everyday people) is harmful for communication.

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