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This is the most puzzling, and, apparently, puzzled, piece I've read today so far, and it's already twenty to nine a.m. Quote: Nihombashi, a district of Tokyo,
by DemocracyFTW2 2y ago
This is the most puzzling, and, apparently, puzzled, piece I've read today so far, and it's already twenty to nine a.m. Quote:
Nihombashi, a district of Tokyo, has long been spelled with “m,” instead of “n,” although the consonant is followed by “b.”
Apart from the punctuation following crazy American rules going really really wrong here, the sentence does not make any sense, at all. You'll see Nihonbashi like 9 out of 10 times on the street and on the maps. Nihombashi is a minority spelling; it is indeed truer to the sound of it as the moraic nasal (written ん as in にほんばし) is not an [n] but rather an "underspecified nasal closure" than can come out as [n], [m], [ŋ] or even a sound approaching [b] depending on the surrounding sounds and the speaker. But it's a usage only followed by a minority.
Now the article says the place name has long been spelled with "m" instead of "n"—not true—and remarks that that is "although" "n" is here followed by "b"—that's wrong, the "m" is used here because the nasal precedes "b", it is a case of retrograde assimilation.
Lastly the article tries to concoct a newsworthy soup out of a bit of thin air that escaped out of a bureaucracy concerned with its own relevance. Be it said that for decades nobody except some nerds, some die-hards, some spelling enthusiasts and unhappy people forced to obey a particular set of arcane rules set up after the war has been, in the past half-century, publicly written "Hukusima" or "zyûdô" in earnest. These are totally cromulent and systematic spellings when you know the system and they're true to the Japanese phonological system, but nobody uses them. The news here is that, maybe, in the future, even fewer people may be using them, and that those who ditched the rules that only applied to some government agencies anyway can now do so without breaking the rules.
- pilaf 2y agoTokyo Metro romanizes 日本橋 as Nihombashi, you can look up the station on Google Maps and check out the photos, the signage showing "Nihombashi" shows up pretty soon. Google Maps itself also romanizes it as Nihombashi. Same applies to 神保町 (Jimbōchō), for instance. https://maps.app.goo.gl/5gDMNmqJwsHTsEUk8 https://maps.app.goo.gl/5gDMNmqJwsHTsEUk8
- DemocracyFTW2 2y agoYou're perfectly right and it's what occurred to me when I lived in Japan, too: you do get to see 'abberant' spellings quite often and that's because train companies decided many, many decades ago on what system to employ for their English station names, and those stuck of course because of printed schedules and so on. Depending on how you count Nihombashi either gets lots of points b/c of the many people who get to see this particular name each day, or it just gets a single point because it's one spot on the map. Observe that when you click through the pictures to get to the actual map—you'll find "Nihonbashi Bridge" spelled in the more common way (including the adorable repetition). So arguably 'Nihonbashi' it is in general but the station name is spelled with an 'm'.
- pilaf 2y agoYeah I think you're right, unless you often visit those places it's more common to just see their names only when you pass by their train stations or see them on the train maps, so the "mb" spellings stand out more.
- DemocracyFTW2 2y agoTry not to get peeve-hooked by it but take it as an expression of the democratic, open societies that the folks in S Korea, Taiwan and Japan try to be and the jumble that is the many divergent transcription systems becomes a way to express their freedom...
- Tainnor 2y agoTry Thailand. People will just make up whatever romanisation they want to. "Fookoosheema" would definitely happen there. They also sometimes randomly throw in an r, not exactly sure why (maybe hypercorrection, because casual speech tends to drop rs).
- DemocracyFTW2 2y agoThe 'r' is to the best of my understanding not thrown in randomly but a reflection of British spelling. British being a non-rhotic dialect of English doesn't sound post-vocalic, pre-consonantal 'r's. Hence in spellings like 'Vajiralongkorn' the 'r' just serves to indicate a long o [ɔː] which contrasts with the short o [o] of 'long'.