5 ms·

Another complication is that some romanisation schemes are ambiguous with regard to long vowels. 「とお」 and 「とう」 might both be represented as "tō", "too", "toh",

Another complication is that some romanisation schemes are ambiguous with regard to long vowels. 「とお」 and 「とう」 might both be represented as "tō", "too", "toh", or (god help us all) "to". It's also somewhat common for signs to be written in kanji and ambiguous romaji, which changes a quick Google Maps lookup into a dictionary adventure. A direct mapping from kana to romaji produces "tou", which is not how it's pronounced[0], but does make it much easier to type in. The classic example is 「東京」/「とうきょう」, pronounced "Toukyou", romanized as "Tokyo". [0] I am currently studying Japanese for "it would be nice to be able to read my bank statements" purposes, and the teacher has spent a great deal of time emphasizing that pairs like 「とう」 and 「とお」 have the same pronunciation. But try to convince someone that the name John ought to be written 「ジャン」 and you'll get the blankest stares.

marcan_42 6y ago
I think you meant it's pronounced "Tookyoo" (but entered as "Toukyou" on a keyboard) :-) As for Katakana versions of English words, honestly, they're kind of all over the place. You eventually develop a decent instinct for how it works, but I think some details really just have no consistency.
- jmillikin 6y ago
  I don't know if it's my imagination, but the leading mora of 東京 sounds much closer to 藤 than it does to 遠い or 十日. It's not a stress difference, more like there's sort of an ... umlaut ... in there? At least, I've had much more than 50/50 luck guessing the difference when looking up unfamiliar vocabulary from TV or YouTube. Oddly, Japanese as a second language has a completely different curriculum (including idiosyncratic labels for grammatical constructs) so for all I know this is yet another well-known linguistic quirk taught to third graders but excluded from JSL textbooks.
  - marcan_42 6y ago
    I think you might be right that there is some nonzero difference in the pronunciation of words containing (o)う vs (o)お sometimes, but it's not pronounced as a proper "ou" most of the time; if you need to pick one, you'd go with straight "oo". I just went through a bunch of examples with a Japanese friend and we can't really find a consistent difference between おう and おお, but it seems we agree that trying to pronounce either too far into "ou" land sounds wrong... at least some of the time... It's kind of tricky :-)
eloisant 6y ago
The correct way to write Tokyo in Hepburn romaji is actually Tōkyō (to indicate the longer "o"). However it's rarely romanized this way. At some point we have to admit that especially for names (of places, people) we don't need to have a "1 to 1" conversion between hiragana and romaji. People pick the name that work well in English or other alphabet-based languages rather than a direct conversion. People who can't speak Japanese are not going to pronounce names correctly anyway.
- greggman3 6y ago
  This is actually a pet peeve of mine. You can find countless examples of people in the USA going out of their way to speak an Italian, French, or Spanish word with the correct Italian, French, or Spanish pronunciation. SNL even did a skit about it. https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/enchilada/n9970 https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/enchilada/n997... I know that skit is a joke but it came about because of events related Latin America being in the news and all the newscasters going out of their way to use the correct pronunciation. It's got absolutely nothing to with saying a word how it looks in English because there are plenty of European origin words that are pronounced far different than they would following English rules. "Pizza" being a simple example. I still hear people doing in regularly in the news, bars, restaurants. But I have never in my life seen any American ever give the same effort to Asian languages. Simple easy examples, there no "ee" sound in "Tokyo" or "Kyoto".
howlgarnish 6y ago
They're actually all ambiguous, because so is Japanese writing. The おう of 王 is a long O, the おう of 追う is two separate vowels (O+U).
Freak_NL 6y ago
> But try to convince someone that the name John ought to be written 「ジャン」 and you'll get the blankest stares. That sounds like an American pronunciation variant with the 'o' shifting towards 'a'. Common given names tend to have a fixed romanization though. See ENAMDICT for a bunch of Johns: http://nihongo.monash.edu/cgi-bin/wwwjdic?1C http://nihongo.monash.edu/cgi-bin/wwwjdic?1C You can vary your romanization of your own name to what actually represents it most closely, but with a very common name like John it would be rather awkward.

marcan_42 6y ago

I think you meant it's pronounced "Tookyoo" (but entered as "Toukyou" on a keyboard) :-) As for Katakana versions of English words, honestly, they're kind of all over the place. You eventually develop a decent instinct for how it works, but I think some details really just have no consistency.

jmillikin 6y ago
I don't know if it's my imagination, but the leading mora of 東京 sounds much closer to 藤 than it does to 遠い or 十日. It's not a stress difference, more like there's sort of an ... umlaut ... in there? At least, I've had much more than 50/50 luck guessing the difference when looking up unfamiliar vocabulary from TV or YouTube. Oddly, Japanese as a second language has a completely different curriculum (including idiosyncratic labels for grammatical constructs) so for all I know this is yet another well-known linguistic quirk taught to third graders but excluded from JSL textbooks.
- marcan_42 6y ago
  I think you might be right that there is some nonzero difference in the pronunciation of words containing (o)う vs (o)お sometimes, but it's not pronounced as a proper "ou" most of the time; if you need to pick one, you'd go with straight "oo". I just went through a bunch of examples with a Japanese friend and we can't really find a consistent difference between おう and おお, but it seems we agree that trying to pronounce either too far into "ou" land sounds wrong... at least some of the time... It's kind of tricky :-)

eloisant 6y ago

The correct way to write Tokyo in Hepburn romaji is actually Tōkyō (to indicate the longer "o"). However it's rarely romanized this way. At some point we have to admit that especially for names (of places, people) we don't need to have a "1 to 1" conversion between hiragana and romaji. People pick the name that work well in English or other alphabet-based languages rather than a direct conversion. People who can't speak Japanese are not going to pronounce names correctly anyway.

greggman3 6y ago
This is actually a pet peeve of mine. You can find countless examples of people in the USA going out of their way to speak an Italian, French, or Spanish word with the correct Italian, French, or Spanish pronunciation. SNL even did a skit about it. https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/enchilada/n9970 https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/enchilada/n997... I know that skit is a joke but it came about because of events related Latin America being in the news and all the newscasters going out of their way to use the correct pronunciation. It's got absolutely nothing to with saying a word how it looks in English because there are plenty of European origin words that are pronounced far different than they would following English rules. "Pizza" being a simple example. I still hear people doing in regularly in the news, bars, restaurants. But I have never in my life seen any American ever give the same effort to Asian languages. Simple easy examples, there no "ee" sound in "Tokyo" or "Kyoto".

howlgarnish 6y ago

They're actually all ambiguous, because so is Japanese writing. The おう of 王 is a long O, the おう of 追う is two separate vowels (O+U).

Freak_NL 6y ago

> But try to convince someone that the name John ought to be written 「ジャン」 and you'll get the blankest stares. That sounds like an American pronunciation variant with the 'o' shifting towards 'a'. Common given names tend to have a fixed romanization though. See ENAMDICT for a bunch of Johns: http://nihongo.monash.edu/cgi-bin/wwwjdic?1C http://nihongo.monash.edu/cgi-bin/wwwjdic?1C You can vary your romanization of your own name to what actually represents it most closely, but with a very common name like John it would be rather awkward.