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Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years
- retrac 3y agoMany who study Japanese, probably prefer the current official system. It more closely reflects Japanese kana spellings. There are multiple ways of writing syllables like "ji" in Japanese and that's why there are multiple ways of writing it in nihonshiki romanization. There are variants of Hepburn that have the same property, but few actually write it strictly - even long vowel sounds may not be shown. Reminds me of Mandarin romanization. Pinyin is quite logical for Mandarin speakers, and students studying the language, but misleading if you just approach it assuming English sound values. The system more closely adapted to English (Wade-Giles romanization) as actually used (no one bothers with all those apostrophes) effectively ignores a bunch of important distinctions in Mandarin. In practice, romanization is trying to achieve two separate goals. The two goals are mutually incompatible, or at least largely work against each other. One goal is to accurately transliterate the language according to its own internal logic. It might mirror aspects of the language's writing system, carefully distinguish between all possible sounds in that language, and it might use morphemes as the language's speakers think about them. For example, a hypothetical romanization of English might always use the letter z to write plurals, even though the actual sound varies from z ~ s depending on environment. This regularity is useful for learners of the language, for academic study, and so on. The other goal is to make it pronounceable to someone who doesn't speak the language in question. When done for a linguistic audience, this is universally done with the International Phonetic Alphabet. But there is no commonly agreed upon way of representing any other language's sounds in English spelling. And so people end up using transliteration systems - often really complicated ones intended for specialist use - when what they really want is a simplified phonetic transcription, something that tells you how to approximately pronounce the word.
- anigbrowl 3y agoAdditional context: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/commentary/2024/03/06/japan/japanese-romanization-rules-change-explained/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/commentary/2024/03/06/japan/jap...
- viburnum 3y agoThanks, that article is much clearer.
- NooneAtAll3 3y ago2 paragraphs isn't that clear
- creminology 3y ago“Hide Reader”. The article is longer than that.
- mock-possum 3y agoThat 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.
- SllX 3y agoYou've got it backwards. Shinjuku is sticking around as the official spelling, or rather becoming the official spelling by adopting Hepburn romanization. The pronunciation wouldn't be any different in either case.
- laborcontract 3y agoIt’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.
- nmeofthestate 3y agoI completely misread the article too (and the 'Additional context' article posted here), I think because it words things strangely but also the whole message is about change and all the examples seem to be of places where the well known spelling is already the Hepburn spelling. So the change is to official spellings that aren't used?
- charcircuit 3y ago>So the change is to official spellings that aren't used? Yes, the whole point is that kunreishiki is not practically used so it doesn't make sense for it to continue to be the official way to romanize things and for it to continue to be taught in school when no one is using it.
- SllX 3y agoNot knocking him, just clarifying. It is terribly written (The Japan Times is an English-language Japanese publication, you can safely knock them for it), but the (untranslated) chart tells the tale: Kunrei-shiki on the left and Hepburn-shiki on the right. What the article doesn't make clear is that Hepburn-shiki is what we're already used to seeing overseas, so for us, nothing is changing. Shibuya is still Shibuya, but the written Romanization is not the best pronunciation guide no matter what form of Romaji.
- zzo38computer 3y agoBoth 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.
- tkgally 3y agoGood 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 the same, so transcribing those kana as ha and hu seems more natural than ha and fu. (This doesn’t apply to zyu for じゅ, however; ju is better.) When I was teaching English academic writing at a Japanese university fifteen years ago, I was struck at how inconsistently the students wrote Japanese names and terms in English. They had been exposed to multiple romanization methods, and most of them couldn’t stick to just one system. I ended up writing a set of detailed guidelines for them [1, 2]. An excellent source for even more information about the intricacies of writing Japanese in English is the Japan Style Sheet [3]. [1] https://park.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/eigo/UT-Komaba-Romanization-of-Japanese-v1.pdf https://park.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/eigo/UT-Komaba-Romanization-o... [2] https://park.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/eigo/UT-Komaba-Nihongo-no-romaji-hyoki-v1.pdf https://park.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/eigo/UT-Komaba-Nihongo-no-rom... [3] https://japanstylesheet.com/download-jss/ https://japanstylesheet.com/download-jss/
- MiguelX413 3y ago⟨sh⟩ /ɕ/ is one consonant phoneme.
- jinushaun 3y agoI 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.
- visarga 3y ago"Shinjuku" to "Sinzyuku"? I don't like it.
- lmm 3y agoSign 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.
- zaik 3y agoMy native language is German and Hepburn is much closer to the correct pronunciation than Kunreishiki.
- downvotetruth 3y agoThe Latin alphabet does not include J, U, and W, but the English alphabet does (see "Shinjuku") and this would likely be better understood as a form of Japanese spelling reform rather than "Romanization".
- lmm 3y ago> The Latin alphabet does not include J, U, and W, but the English alphabet does (see "Shinjuku") Japanese does not naturally include distinct U/V letters and does not have a first-class concept that needs to be written with a J; the official way to romanize that place name is "Sinzyuku" and that's morally equivalent to a traditional-Latin "SINZYVKV". W does exist but is decidedly second-class and declining (only the "Wa" sound is really heard any more; I suspect it will go the way of obsolete phonemes like "Ye" and "We" soon enough). > this would likely be better understood as a form of Japanese spelling reform rather than "Romanization". It makes no sense as a way of spelling Japanese. It's about standardising on anglicising Japanese instead of romanising it.
- roschdal 3y ago[flagged]
- bitwize 3y agoI recognize Kunrei-shiki as the style used in Eleanor Harz Jorden's seminal Japanese textbook, Japanese: The Spoken Language. I always thought Hepburn style was more appropriate for the goals of that book: to convey spoken Japanese in a way understandable to English speakers. But I think Jorden intended for accompanying audio materials to supply a pronunciation guide. (My Japanese professor was a native speaker, and so used her own voice, not audio materials accompanying the textbook.)
- swatson741 3y agoThe 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.
- timr 3y agoGiven 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 and be able deduce the onyomi readings of each (or at least, of 南, which is the most common reading of a basic kanji), and will not need romanization. The real value of the romaji is for people who know nothing of the language, and it's just weird that the common romanization leaves these important vowel details out. (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.)
- Hamuko 3y agoWhat? Isn't こう/コー supposed to be "kō" under Hepburn?
- speak_plainly 3y agoI 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 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. While Pinyin was probably the best choice for enhancing literacy in China, it has inadvertently created hurdles for foreigners. In contrast, Japan’s Hepburn system has avoided such challenges.
- TulliusCicero 3y agoI mean it probably helps that few, if any Japanese sounds are alien to English speakers. I've studied some Japanese, been several times, can't remember any sounds that were particularly difficult (whereas Japanese speakers definitely struggle with some English sounds, like "th" and "l"). There are intonation aspects that are hard for (native) English speakers, and the syllable speed is higher than English, but the basic sounds are straightforward to grasp.
- lmm 3y agoつ is an unnatural sound for at least some English speakers, and can be hard to distinguish from す. The short/long vowel distinction is also completely alien at first (e.g. people are mostly familiar with the pronunciation of Tōkyō, but the natural reading of "Tokyo" in English would be quite different, starting with a "tock" sound).
- ThePowerOfFuet 3y agoSurely the fact that "Chinese" (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc) is tonal while Japanese is not is also a factor.
- lifthrasiir 3y agoThat sounds backwards to me. Hepburn is widespread because Japan once had a very widespread reach over the world, so much that a system tuned for westerners is inevitably going to appear. Chinese Pinyin is a much later development and widely known Chinese names are indeed written in Pinyin with minor variantions. For example, the name "Beijing" is an unaccented version of Pinyin "Běijīng", and it swiftly replaced a previous spelling "Peking" which was in use for over 4 centuries.
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoInteresting 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 of Indigenous naming etc just off top of my head. I suppose that's formal naming and not language constructs but still.
- fenomas 3y agoThis 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.
- nbenitezl 3y ago¿Romanization? But English is not a Romance language.
- neilalexander 3y agoNothing to do with English. It's about the Latin or "Roman" alphabet.
- worklaptopacct 3y agoBut 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.
- aidog 3y agoGood. 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.
- acadapter 3y agoThe "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"?
- z500 3y agoThe 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.
- dudeinjapan 3y agoThis reminds me of the time I dated a Japanese gal who said she worked at Footers.
- wrp 3y agoI 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.