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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

#91

Post by anigbrowl »

SllX wrote: post #62
Hamuko wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 text…

I don't know about that. If you look at the bylines more than half the writers come from anglophone countries, and a lot of the feature articles seem aimed at foreign settlers in Japan. They take breaking news from the Kyodo newswire and mostly do features.

My Japanese isn't good enough to read the news at speed, but I can manage TV news; there's a lot of stories that don't show up in the Japan Times until a week later. They do cover major political, economic, and crime (if it's a murder) news in a timely fashion.

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

#92

Post by lmm »

baerrie wrote: post #79
lmm wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

> 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.

Only if they're English speakers! If your only language is e.g. Irish then writing that sound as "Shi" is more confusing than writing it as "Si".

> 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

Maybe. Or maybe the way Hepburn creates "blurred" words that are partially English and partially Japanese causes more confusion than having a clear distinction between written English and written Japanese words that makes it easier to pronounce each one in the way appropriate to that language (i.e. fully code-switch as fluent bilingual people do).

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

#93

Post by lmm »

anigbrowl wrote: post #88
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 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.

> 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.

Irish pronunciation may be local, but the orthography is very consistent. I actually felt there was a lot in common between Kunreisiki and Irish - at first blush it's very confusing for a native English speaker, but once you get over that initial reflex and read it according to its own rules it all makes sense.

> 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.

Right, but doing that will paper over the issues with any romanisation system. What do you find worse about Kunreisiki?

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

#94

Post by SllX »

anigbrowl wrote: post #91
SllX wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 text…

I don't know about that. If you look at the bylines more than half the writers come from anglophone countries, and a lot of the feature articles seem aimed at foreign settlers in Japan. They take breaking news from the Kyodo newswire and mostly do features. My Japanese isn't good enough to read the news at speed, but I can manage TV news; there's a lot of stories that don't show up in the Japan Times until a week lat…

It is possible my information about The Japan Times is basically historic and out of date at this point since organizations do change. This is the premise upon which the paper was originally founded and continued to operate on for most of its history, but I also don’t follow The Japan Times anymore.

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

#95

Post by drtgh »

mock-possum wrote: post #4

That means terms like “shinjuku” will probably survive as retro touchstones - good vaporwave material, when people look back and say “remember when sinzuku used be spelled ‘shinjuku’ and it sounded like…” Good for tee shirts and tchotchkes.

The article is a bit confusing, and the photo with the station's name doesn't help,

The station names and place-name signs, when we see them written with Latin characters, are using romanization Hepburn rules since many decades ago, shinjuku stay shinjuku.

What is happening is that at the same time, the Ministry of Education had been officially teaching different romanisation rules to the Japanese, denominated Monbusho system, which is slightly different with some latin syllables, like si (shi in Herpburn) or ti (chi in Herpburn), but now they are officially going to step towards Herpburn rules, the same as those used in the place-name signs when are written with Latin characters.

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

#96

Post by color_me_not »

jinushaun wrote: post #80
tkgally wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 disagre…

> Romanization is for foreigners. Japanese people would read the original kana/kanji anyway

Assuming it is only used for reading purpose. It is actually also useful for typing in Japanese with a keyboard without kanas, though it is still mostly relevant for foreigners.

Side note: I personally like input systems that support both romanizations simultaneously, since there are shorter combinations in each one. For instance, "si" saves one letter compared to "shi", and "ju" is also easier to type compared to "zyu".

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

#97

Post by anigbrowl »

lmm wrote: post #93
anigbrowl wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. Irish pronunciation may be local, but the orthography is very consistent. I actually felt there was a lot in common between Kunreisiki and Irish - at first blush it's very confusing for a na…

I don't have a strong opinion on Kunreisiki; when I first came across it I thought 'this looks needlessly complicated' and just assumed it was old and outmoded so basically I've always ignored it. My first introduction to Japanese was from a friend who taught me the pronunciation and hiragana at the same time, so I got used to the sounds well before encountering Romaji. I only learned about the history of Romanization and took a more rigorous interest in the language years later.

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

#98

Post by lmm »

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.

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

Not one language has speakers who will naturally pronounce "Shinjuku" exactly correctly either - no two languages are alike, and it's normal and healthy to have pronunciation differences between languages natively written with the same alphabet (e.g. English speakers will naturally mispronounce many Spanish words - no-one would suggest this means Spanish spelling should change). Plenty of languages (e.g. Irish or Polish) naturally read "Sinzyuku" as something closer to the correct pronunciation than "Shinjuku", which is the only reasonable way to compare.

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

#99

Post by baerrie »

lmm wrote: post #92
baerrie wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> 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. Only if they're English speakers! If your only language is e.g. Irish then writing that sound as "Shi" is more confusing than writing it as "Si". > Not to mention katakana spellings and pronunciation which further confuse their learning of En…

Yeah those are fair points. I still think that to encourage wider learning and understanding from foreigners, using English as a base model makes sense because it is most widely taught across the world.

As far as the second point, I taught English in Japan and found that while English education starts at an extremely young age, their relative skill is pretty low compared to other countries that do the same. There are a couple of reasons for this but I think further integration of English pronunciation could help in this department while also appealing to the widest swathe of tourists possible.

Another funny thing I’ve found is that the romaji JP iphone keyboard autofills kana and kanji best with hepburn inputs

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

#100

Post by MiguelX413 »

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…

⟨sh⟩ /ɕ/ is one consonant phoneme.
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