This reminds me of the time I dated a Japanese gal who said she worked at Footers.
Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years
81–90 of 100 posts
Re: Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years
#82I wish Korea would do the same. I've taught in linguistics departments in Japan and Korea, and I've had many arguments over romanization policies.
What is the point of romanization? Who is it for? If it is for the benefit of non-speakers, then the pronunciation assigned to the Latin letters should be predictable based on common usage internationally. If it is for the benefit of native speakers...well, why? Japanese and Korean have perfectly good alphabets. It doesn't benefit Japanese or Koreans to transcribe their language into the Latin alphabet.
Pinyin is a different case. As I understand it, Pinyin was developed in the 1950s as a literacy aid for native Chinese speakers, so developers were free to be creative with the pronunciations of the letters.
Re: Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years
#83The "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"?
The article says Hepburn romanization is based on English consonants readings. Maybe if they based it on Russian instead you would see them using iotated and non-iotated vowels.
Re: Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years
#84Re: Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years
#85I 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…
There's hiragana/katakana for regular transcription of spoken Japanese. I'm guessing that's slightly different situation to Chinese language which does not have a phonographic script.
Re: Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
What? Isn't こう/コー supposed to be "kō" under Hepburn?
News to me! If so, that makes sense, but I rarely/never see the use of the accent mark.
No one knows how to type that character on computers and not in a lot of cases it make sense to use non-ASCII Latin alphabets
Re: Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years
#87I 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…
Kun-rei has a learning cost and no one is paying for it. Hepburn or its close-enough "Ohtani" analogue is free due to (notoriously bad)compulsory English training as well as use of Romaji input on computers, and technical rule conformance to actual Hepburn is never questioned so it wins.
I don't know, I think the real sad part is that everyone knows the casual Hepburn from Romaji popularity; Kana shall be default from a nationalistic, purist, standpoint. Mazda and Ohtani are fine, certainly better than Zhang and Nguyen situation, which are supposed to be pronounced "chan" and "gwen" but being mostly sources of confusion.
Re: Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years
#88Sign 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 Irish and I disagree. If you think English pronunciation rules are odd or inconsistent, then Irish will make you cry out in pain, as dialects from less than a hundred miles away can sound wildly different.
I don't use Romaji much but I learned the Japanese syllabary ~35 years ago so translating Hepburn to correct pronunciation doesn't involve any conscious thought on my part.
Re: Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years
#89Earlier 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.
People absolutely do write this way. My guess is that the article writer is from the UK rather than the US. British English often involves longer and more complex clauses and something not unlike operator overloading.
Re: Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Aichi will replace Aiti” seems pretty clear to me.
The article talks about how "y" is replacing "x" as the official romanization in Japan. "The official spelling of the central Japan prefecture of Aichi" indicates that "Aichi" is the official spelling. This means to me that "Aichi" is "y" and, by extension, that "Aiti" is "x". "Aichi will replace Aiti" doesn't add any clarity if it's breaking that logic. There's a reason why others also find this article hard to pars…
Yes, Y replacing X reading is correct.
It's hard to parse because the Japanese system is itself a mess. The (former) official romanization rules say the name of this prefecture should be written Aiti but the official practice is to write it as Aichi because that's easier to teach to non-Japanese.
Consider that the romanization rules were (iirc) mostly originating from the ministry of education, but that ministries responsible for trade and tourism would naturally prefer to use whatever is easiest for foreign partners to deal with, and could lobby for exceptions since they're revenue centers rather than cost centers. Japan has both a professional bureaucracy under a parliamentary system and de facto one party rule, so (imho) there's much greater potential for policy balkanization of this sort.