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Japan to revise romanization rules for first time in 70 years
- rfarley04 10mo agoI live in Thailand and I cannot get over the fact that romanization is (seemingly?) completely unstandardized. Even government signage uses different English spelling of Thai words.
- kazinator 10mo agoIn the first place, "romanization" of English is unstandardized! Or was that unstandardised?
- adastra22 10mo agoIt tends to be standardized within a single country.
- qingcharles 10mo agoWhoosh :)
- adastra22 10mo agoNo I understood. I just failed to see the relevance.
- merelysounds 10mo agoStandardizations can be notoriously inconsistent[1], disregarded[2] or evolve fast[3]. There’s a surprising amount of interesting articles on wikipedia about that. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)#Spelling_reforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)#Spelling_re... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_dialect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_dialect [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensational_spelling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensational_spelling
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- aidenn0 10mo agoIs it hiccough or hiccup in the US?
- jagged-chisel 10mo agoAnd standardised within an empire.
- Stevvo 10mo agoThailand, famously, was never colonized by European powers. Everywhere else, some colonial administrator standardized a system of romanization.
- floren 10mo agoJapan was not colonized, although it was briefly occupied.
- petesergeant 10mo agoOh there are plenty of standards, including an official one. The problem is nobody uses them. Thai writing is weird, and between the tones and the character classes and silent letters might as well just make some shit up. My birth certificate, drivers license, and work permit all had different spellings of my name on them. IIRC, the road signs for “Henri Dunant Road” were spelled differently on either end, which was ironic, because at least that did have a canonical Latin form.
- graemep 10mo agoSri Lanka was a colony and Sinhala does not have a standard as far as I know. If there is one no one pays any attention to it.
- ilamont 10mo agoYou should have seen Taiwan in the 1990s. It was a hot mess of older Western romanization systems, historical and dialectical exceptions, competing Taiwanese and pro-China sensibilities, a widely used international standard (pinyin), and lots of confusion in official and private circles about the proper way to write names and locations using the Latin alphabet. In 1998, the City of Taipei even made up its own Romanization system for street names at the behest of its then-new mayor, a supporter of Taiwan independence (https://pinyin.info/news/2019/article-on-early-tongyong-pinyin-on-taipei-street-signs/ https://pinyin.info/news/2019/article-on-early-tongyong-piny...). The chart halfway down this blog post lays out some of the challenges once the hanyu pinyin standard was instituted in 2009: https://frozengarlic.wordpress.com/on-romanization/ https://frozengarlic.wordpress.com/on-romanization/ The author concludes with this observation: So that’s why people in Taiwan can’t spell anything consistently and why all the English-language newspapers spell the same things differently. As for me, I’m giving up on trying to remember how everyone spells their name. I know lots of people, especially Taiwan nationalists, dislike having the PRC hanyu pinyin system. I dislike imposing it upon them. However, in only three weeks, I’ve found myself spelling the same thing in multiple ways and wasting time looking up how I did it last time. Since almost no one reads my blog anyway, I’ll do it the way that’s most convenient for me. I’ll also always provide the Chinese characters so that people who can read them know who I’m talking about.
- jerriep 10mo agoYeah, my full names are Jeremia Josiah, and on my work permit they wrote the Thai version as เจอเรเมีย โยชิอา. I cannot figure out why they chose to use จ for the J in Jeremia but ย for the J in Josiah. Both are pronounced the same and I would consider จ the correct choice. I would consider ย more correct for representing a word with Y.
- rfarley04 10mo agoThat's hilarious. The one I always notice is ก getting romanized as a K, ie Kanchanaburi or กานต์ becoming Karn.
- yongjik 10mo agoKorea is stuck in a funny middle ground, where names like cities or railway stations all follow the standard without exception, while personal or corporate names are in a state of total chaos. So the cell phone maker is Samsung, but the subway station in Seoul is Samseong, even though they're written and pronounced in the same way in Korean. (No, they aren't related.) It's unfortunate but I don't think it'll get fixed any time soon. Nobody wants to be called Mr. I, O, U, An, or No. (The most common romanization for these family names would be: Lee, Oh, Woo, Ahn, and Roh.)
- deaux 10mo agoYou've nerd sniped me! No country is going to force their big multinationals to change their international name they chose back in the 50s and are now known as world-wide. Personal names aren't too chaotic either, as the choice presented when choosing a romanization is limited, people can't just make stuff up on the ground. They're off, but generally in the same ways. > Nobody wants to be called Mr. I, O, U, An, or No. An is pretty common - given the massive reach of KPop among global youth, I wouldn't be surprised if the most well-known 안씨 as of 2025 was an "An" (a member of the group 아이브). Roh has fallen out of favor, young 노s generally go with Noh, the Rohs are usually older people. I too do long for the day where an 이 or 우 just goes with I or U, or if they must, at least Ih or Uh :) IMO you left out the worst offender, Park. At least with 이 or 우 I can see why people would be hesitant to go the proper route, as most of the world is unfamiliar with single-phoneme names, but 박s have no excuse. With 이, there's a pretty good alternative as well, and what's more - it's actually already in use when talking about the greatest Korean in history, Yi Sun-Shin! So much better than "Lee".
- Theofrastus 10mo agoI'm honestly surprised Hepburn wasn't the official standard yet. It sounds way closer to the spoken sounds, at least to my western ears. > The council’s recommendation also adopts Hepburn spellings for し, じ and つ as shi, ji, and tsu, compared to the Kunrei spellings of si, zi and tu. I could imagine si, zi and tu sound closer to the spoken sounds to Mandarin speakers.
- wyan 10mo agoNot closer to the spoken sounds, closer to English orthography.
- Theofrastus 10mo agoNative German speaker here. It fits very well here, too
- mono442 10mo agoIt works better with other European languages' orthography too.
- mytailorisrich 10mo agoI don't know the details history of the system's development, however I notice that with Kunrei everything spelling is neatly 2 characters while with Hepburn it may be 2 or 3 characters: Kunrei: ki si ti ni hi mi Hepburn: ki shi chi ni hi mi The politics of the issue is obviously that Hepburn is older and an American system while Nihon and Kunrei are very purposely domestic (Nihon "is much more regular than Hepburn romanization, and unlike Hepburn's system, it makes no effort to make itself easier to pronounce for English-speakers" [1]). Apparently, Hepburn was later imposed by US occupying forces in 1945. Perhaps 80 years is long enough and suitable to effect the change officially with no loss of face. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihon-shiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihon-shiki
- Theofrastus 10mo agoThe political aspect might be a big part of why and how the systems are chosen. Didn't know about that!
- ChrisArchitect 10mo agoPreviously in 2024 (?): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39624972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39624972
- dang 10mo agoThanks! Macroexpanded: English-friendly Romanization system proposed for Japanese language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42606969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42606969 - Jan 2025 (23 comments) Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39624972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39624972 - March 2024 (97 comments)
- kazinator 10mo agoHepburn is poorly supported in some input methods, like on Windows. If you want to type kōen or whatever, you really have to work for that ō. It's better now on mobile devices and MacOS (what I'm using now): I just long-pressed o and picked ō from a pop-up.
- adastra22 10mo agoIs that part of Hepburn? It is not mentioned in the article, nor by most explainers that I’m familiar with.
- QuercusMax 10mo agoThe article says the new style says that you can use either a macron or a doubled letter, but it's not clear if that's supported for keyboard input on various platforms.
- kazinator 10mo agoBut in the case of ō, you can only use a doubled letter if the underlying word is おお. If it is おう then you don't have a doubled letter you can use; you need "ou" and that's not Hepburn any more. It is "wāpuro rōmaji" (word processor romaji).
- shiomiru 10mo ago"ou" is fine too, actually. See the proposal p. 14 (=16 in the PDF): https://www.bunka.go.jp/seisaku/bunkashingikai/sokai/pdf/94261201_01.pdf https://www.bunka.go.jp/seisaku/bunkashingikai/sokai/pdf/942... (To differentiate between the case where it's actually two vowels, you have to put an apostrophe inbetween; their example is 小唄 -> ko'uta.)
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- layer8 10mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepburn_romanization#Long_vowels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepburn_romanization#Long_vowe...
- phantasmish 10mo agoOh no. This is going to make finding specific Japanese game roms even more annoying.
- lbotos 10mo agoElaborate? I’m not following.
- phantasmish 10mo agoFor people not familiar with Japanese, finding any info about a Japanese-language game can be a pain. They may have a Japanese representation, an official romanized name, a community romanized name using a different system… plus may also go by an outright English-language name, in some circles, which may (or may not) overlap with the name of an English-language port (if it exists). Then consider that some games have pretty extreme and confusing name variants in various editions or on different platforms, and those may go by different names in different contexts. You can see the same game go by three different names on a community forum, Wikipedia, and a catalogue of games + md5sums for a system (you might think the md5sum could act as a Rosetta Stone here… but less so than you’d think, especially in the specific context of an English speaker and Japanese games, as you sometimes need some specific, old, oddball and slightly-broken dump of a game to get the one a particular English patch requires… and god knows what name you’ll find that under, but probably not the same md5sum as a clean dump) The only bright spot in this is that if you can find a Japanese game on Wikipedia the very first superscript-citation almost always lists the official Japanese title in Japanese script on hover. That’s a life saver. (Presumably all of this is easier if you know at least some Japanese) Though after I posted my comment I realized they mean they’re switching to another existing system (which I think is already widely used in gaming circles? Not sure though) which isn’t so bad. At least it’s not another one being added to the mix.
- aidenn0 10mo agoEven with official names of media you can get stuck. Consider 彼氏彼女の事情[1]. The Japanese name is the same for the Manga and Anime, but the official names for the US localization of each are different (the manga went with a romanization of an abbreviation of the Japanese name Kare Kano while the Anime went with a translation of the full name His and Her Circumstances. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kare_Kano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kare_Kano
- qingcharles 10mo agoThey need to do the same for a bunch of languages, e.g. Arabic.
- WalterBright 10mo agoPlease bring back Fraktur.
- wudangmonk 10mo ago[flagged]
- dexwiz 10mo agoYou are getting downvoted, but I have heard Japan has surprisingly low literacy rates (well below the 99% stated by the government) for just this reason.
- GaggiX 10mo agoJapan has an extremely high literacy rate.
- pezezin 10mo agoI am not sure about the literacy rates, but I live in Japan and pretty much every single Japanese person I have ever talked to has told me how painful kanji are and how they wished the Japanese writing system was easier. In comparison, my mother language is Spanish, a language with very simple spelling rules. My girlfriend is always surprised how she can read out loud a random Spanish text and even though she doesn't understand it, I will understand her easily (it also helps that both languages have very similar sounds).
- ehnto 10mo agoHow would you solve the homonym problem without a kanji like character set? I am sure it's possible but that would be a big challenge. (For the reader, Japanese has a lot of homonyms since it has a comparatively limited set of phonemes. Specifically a problem in writing due to lack of context, spaces and lack of tonality that can help disambiguate the language when spoken)
- pezezin 10mo agoThe biggest source of homonyms are words imported from Chinese, as Chinese morphemes are usually monosyllabic. It is already a problem in Chinese due to the limited phonotactics, made even worse in Japanese. So the most obvious solution would be to drop on'yomi (Chinese readings) and go to pure kun'yomi (Japanese readings) whenever possible. My understanding is that such a strategy was used by the Koreans to replace Hanja with Hangul. Now, I understand that it would be a massive undertaking and extremely unlikely to ever happen, and honestly it's not really my problem, so I am just speculating here xD
- kazinator 10mo agoCuriously enough, Hepburn romanization fixes some ambiguities in Japanese (Japanese written in kana alone) while introducing others. The ō in Hepburn could correspond to おう or おお or オー. That's an ambiguity. Where does Hepburn disambiguate? In Japanese, an E column kana followed by I sometimes makes a long E, like in 先生 (sen + sei -> sensē). The "SEI" is one unit. But in other situations it does not, like in a compound word ending in the E kana, where the second word starts with I. For instance 酒色 (sake + iro -> sakeiro, not sakēro). Hepburn distinguishes these; the hiragana spelling does not! This is one of the issues that makes it very hard to read Japanese that is written with hiragana only, rather than kanji. No word breaks and not knowing whether せい is supposed to be sē or sei. There are curiosities like karaage which is "kara" (crust) + "age" (fried thing). A lot of the time it is pronounced as karāge, because of the way RA and A come together. Other times you hear a kind of flutter in it which articulates two A's. I have no idea which romanization to use. Flip a coin?
- nemomarx 10mo agoUse Ruby text alongside kanji, maybe?
- sdovan1 10mo agoFWIW, it's HTML ruby tag, not the language. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/ruby https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
- rpearl 10mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_character https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_character
- Macha 10mo agoWhat's interesting is that they address this problem where the latin alphabet introduces the ambiguity (Is genin げんいん or げにん? Hepburn goes with gen'in for the former to avoid ambiguity), so they could have extended that to sake'iro and applied the same strategy when the ambiguity comes from kana itself.
- the_gipsy 10mo agoLa li lu le lo?
- mc3301 10mo agoThere's a beach called "らららサンビーチ" in Japan. While driving there, you can pass a signs that say "LaLaLa Sun Beach" as well as "RaRaRa Sun Beach."
- eatsleepmonad 10mo agoThe language school I attended all but banned romanization. The idea was to learn, practice, and finally internalize kana and kanji as quickly as possible. Hepburn is just a band-aid when it comes to language study. For people not interested in learning Japanese, however, a unified romanization could have its benefits. It just never struck me as particularly inconsistent to begin with, even after so many years living there.
- akst 10mo agoYeah my impression was the Orthography is pretty consistent compared to English. From what I understand this isn't the first time they've made some kind of change to orthography, I remember reading something about updating offical use of certain kana to reflect more modern pronunciations. It wasn't a dramatic change. It's interesting to see some countries just have this centralised influence over something like how their language is written as they're the main ones speaking it, as opposed to English.
- throwaway2037 10mo ago> Yeah my impression was the Orthography is pretty consistent compared to English. As a native English speaker, I have learned this watching non-natives try to learn English spelling over the years. It is hell! I studied French in middle school and high school. I remember there being a similar level of ambiguity in their orthography (similar to English). One weird thing that I have noticed when Japanese native speakers write emails in English: Why don't they use basic spell check? I'm talking about stuff as basic as: "teh" -> "the". Spell checkers from the early 1990s could easily correct these issues. To be clear, I rarely have an issue to understand the meaning of their emails (as a native speaker, it is very easy to skip over minor spelling and grammar mistakes), but I wonder: Why not spell check before you send?
- astrobe_ 10mo ago> As a native English speaker, I have learned this watching non-natives try to learn English spelling over the years. It is hell! I studied French in middle school and high school. I remember there being a similar level of ambiguity in their orthography (similar to English). Yes. I think english is even slightly worth than french wrt spelling/sound mismatches, but you can call me biased. Moreover, William the Conqueror, who brought civilization to England, also brought the inconsistencies of the french spelling with him. > I wonder: Why not spell check before you send? Well, some of my coworkers don't either, from french to french. And up to recently in most programs it was a bother to switch back and forth between 2 languages. But really, that's probably about common laziness; the typos you mention can be caught by proof-reading before sending, which can also catch other mistakes like missing words or inconsistent sentences caused rewrites. Proof-reading just after writing is not the best tho, as you tend to skip words because it is "too fresh". I try to introduce some time gap between the too (for instance, proof-reading after lunch or the next morning).
- aidenn0 10mo agoAnyone where the "ou" romanization for long o vowels comes from (e.g. 少年 being rendered as "shounen" rather than "shoonen" or "shōnen")? [edit] Wikipedia suggests it might be from Wāpuro rōmaji, where "u" is always used to spell the kana "う"
- kagevf 10mo agoWikipedia is right; the romanization is just matching how it's rendered in kana.
- layer8 10mo agoLook at the standard kana table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goj%C5%ABon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goj%C5%ABon
- mc3301 10mo agoBecause 少年 in hiragana is しょうねん: spelled out that is "sho u ne n" Many, but not all long vowels in japanese follow these: ああ a i -> as in おかあさん, mother いい i i -> as in ちいさい, small うう u u -> as in すう, to smoke えい e i -> as in せんせい, a teacher おう o u -> as in こうえん, a park Yes, exceptions to this exist (like おお) and some are actually dipthongs and not actually long-vowels, but easier to think of them like that.
- AdamH12113 10mo agoSome background for those who aren't familiar: "Romanization" refers to converting Japanese sounds into the Latin (Roman) alphabet. In Japanese, these sounds are written with phonetic characters called kana. (There are two types of kana; I'm only going to talk about hiragana here.) Each kana represents either a vowel or a consonant followed by a vowel. For example: あ (a), こ (ko), ね (ne). Aside from a terminating n/m sound (ん), there are no characters for standalone consonants. There are five vowels (a i u e o). The kana are usually written in a table where each row is a vowel and each column is a consonant, like on Wikipedia[1]. Most columns of the table have five characters, each representing the same consonant combined with one of the vowels. For example: か/き/く/け/こ ka/ki/ku/ke/ko, ま/み/む/め/も ma/mi/mu/me/mo. Some columns have "missing" sounds (や/ゆ/よ ya/yu/yo); but what's important for our purposes is that some columns have irregular sounds: さ/し/す/せ/そ sa/shi/su/se/so and た/ち/つ/て/と ta/chi/tsu/te/to. There are no si, ti, or tu sounds in standard Japanese; they have shi, chi, and tsu instead. Using diacritic markings gets you more consonants. Most of these are made by adding a couple tick marks to the corner of the character, which makes the consonant voiced instead of unvoiced. For example: か ka -> が ga, と to -> ど do, ひ hi -> び bi. But the irregular sounds stay irregular: し shi -> じ ji instead of zi, ち chi -> ぢ ji (again) instead of di, and つ tsu -> づ zu instead of du. (す su -> ず zu gives the same sound but in a regular way.) You can also combine i-vowel characters with y-consonant characters to get sounds with consonant clusters: き ki + や ya = きゃ kya, み mi + よ yo = みょ myo, etc. The irregular sounds remain irregular: し shi + ゆ yu = しゅ shu (instead of syu), ち chi + や ya = ちゃ cha (instead of tya), じ ji + よ yo = じょ jo (instead of zyo). There's a Reddit post with a nice table showing all the available sounds[2]. Now the problem for romanization is this: Should the romanization reflect the irregular sounds in the spoken language? Or should it reflect the regular groupings of the kana characters? づ and ず might both be pronounced "zu", but they come from different linguistic origins, just as "bear" and "bare" do in English. The Hepburn system uses spellings that match the sounds, while the current standard (Kunrei-shiki) uses spellings that match the kana grouping: し si (instead of shi), ち ti (instead of chi), じ zi (instead of ji), つ tu (instead of tsu), じょ syo (instead of sho), etc. The Hepburn system tells you how to pronounce the word[3] at the cost of being a lossy encoding. For anyone familiar with the Latin alphabet, that's almost always the better choice, and it's nearly universal in the Western world. Kunrei-shiki does better reflect the underlying structure of the Japanese language and its native writing system, which is probably why the Japanese government preferred it. But anyone who wants to learn the language is going to learn the kana almost immediately (it's just a few hours with flash cards), so IMHO that's pretty small advantage. I deliberately didn't talk about long vowels, glottal stops, the differences between hiragana and katakana, different pronunciations of ん (n), or how to handle ん (n) followed by a vowel, but if you're curious about Japanese romanization those topics may also be of interest to you. I can try to explain more if anyone's curious. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kana_chart_1.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kana_chart_1.png [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/awzw04/kana_table_for_beginners/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/awzw04/kana_... [3] Most of the consonants are the same as English or close enough and are trivial to write in the Latin alphabet. The big exception is ら/り/る/れ/ろ, normally written ra/ri/ru/re/ro but it's not really the English r sound. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_and_alveolar_taps_and_flaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_and_alveolar_tap...
- shevy-java 10mo ago"The council’s recommendation also adopts Hepburn spellings for し, じ and つ as shi, ji, and tsu, compared to the Kunrei spellings of si, zi and tu." Is that an anti-China thing? Or is it a simplification thing? I don't fully understand the underlying motivation.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- brigandish 10mo agoKunrei makes more sense to a Japanese native, Hepburn makes more sense to a non-Japanese native. As the article points out, Hepburn has come to dominate, so they're simply aligning with it rather than having two systems hanging around.
- belviewreview 10mo agoAbout a decade ago, I became a fan of the remarkable Japanese child prodigy drummer Kanade Sato. That lead to me to learn the surprising fact that Japan has 4 writing systems: kanji, hiragana, katakana, and romanji. Here's the video that got me interested in Sato www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYpFL08m5fQ&list=RDXYpFL08m5fQ&start_radio=1
- flumpcakes 10mo agoImpressive drumming skills!
- donatj 10mo agoIs been 25 years since I took Japanese in highschool but I'm relatively certain that our textbooks had ち romanized as tchi which from my recollection seems more accurate to its actual common pronunciation.
- mc3301 10mo agoI have seen chi and ti, both of which when qwerty typed on standard windows or mac produce ち. I have never seen it as tchi. つ is often seen as tu or tsu. I have been in Japan for over a decade.
- ptx 10mo agoPerhaps only in the case where it's preceded by the small tsu? E.g. "一人ぼっち" -> "hitori bo[tsu]chi" -> "hitori botchi"? That's what Wikipedia says [1], although I think it's also common to (incorrectly?) use "bocchi" instead. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepburn_romanization#Long_consonants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepburn_romanization#Long_cons...
- bentley 10mo ago“tchi” is the Hepburn romanization of っち. (Knowing very little Japanese myself, the first example that comes to mind is たまごっち → tamagotchi.)
- SV_BubbleTime 10mo agocrackles knuckles I have Real Real Japan on my YouTube algorithm. So, I’m a bit of an expert on this topic…
- mc3301 10mo agoHow about Dogen?
- hilbert42 10mo ago"The council’s recommendation also adopts Hepburn spellings for し, じ and つ as shi, ji, and tsu, compared to the Kunrei spellings of si, zi and tu." As a Westerner I know very little Japanese but having worked in Japan for a short while I take an interest in the language. When reading this it occurred to me there might have been more reason for adopting the Hepburn spelling than stated. As as English speaker I've noticed how poorly we pronounce Japanese words and perhaps this change is also intended as a subtle way of letting us know. English has a long tradition of stealing words from other languages then mangling them almost beyond recognition because we're too lazy to take efforts to pronounce them correctly. To me, this is a form of language arrogance. Foe example, I've long complained about the adoption in recent decades of the word tsunami into English and then mangling its pronunciation beyond recognition. I'm old enough to remember when 'tidal wave' was the generally accepted wording for that ocean phenomenon—now we've replaced these perfectly understandable and descriptive English words with tsunami, which to English speakers is both seemingly unpronounceable and conveys no meaningful description in English. Right, the introduction of the unpronounceable tsunami into English unnecessarily increased the entropy of the language a notch further. Why, for what purpose? Seems to me the only plausible reason is more because of erudite snobbishness than out of any practical utilitarian reason. That said, I'm not opposed to English stealing words from foreign languages when it makes sense, for example the German zeitgeist is a wonderful expressive replacement for the spirit of the times, similarly translating say gedankenexperiment is straightforward but we don't do so as the word has a rich contextual meaning for physicists both in English and other languages. Thus, it's best left as is. Back to tsunami. Whenever I hear the word mispronounced by those who ought to know better it just grates badly, the mangled mispronunciation distracts my attention from what's actually being said. So often one hears TV newsreaders including those on the BBC slur the word as 'sooonami' when clearly its English spelling indicates the correct pronunciation. Tsu, つ, sounds like a hissing snake—say it to yourself. Is that not obvious? Fashion should not be the reason for stealing foreign words but rather because it makes sense to do so. Moreover, we should be respectful of the languages from whence these words came. Perhaps the adoption of the Hepburn spellings is a Japanese hint suggesting that we try a little harder.
- discomrobertul8 10mo ago> Back to tsunami. Whenever I hear the word mispronounced by those who ought to know better it just grates badly, the mangled mispronunciation distracts my attention from what's actually being said. So often one hears TV newsreaders including those on the BBC slur the word as 'sooonami' when clearly its English spelling indicates the correct pronunciation. Tsu, つ, sounds like a hissing snake—say it to yourself. Is that not obvious? It's because English has no (or very few - I can't think of any) words that begin with the same phoneme. That's just what happens with loan words. Japanese loaned "Arbeit" (アルバイト) from German and they also pronounce it "wrong".
- apflkx 10mo agoTranscription gets even messier when more than two languages are involved. Russian uses the Polianov system as a "cyrillization" method. It's neither Hepburn nor Kunrei-shiki, which can be confusing if you are a Russian Language learner and know Japanese or English. Some Japanese words entered Russian not directly, but through English. In these cases, the word is first romanized using Hepburn, and then adapted to Russian using English-to-Russian rules. A classic example is 寿司, which Polianov would render as суси (susi), but Russians mostly know as суши (sushi). Then there are words which actually do faithfully follow Polianov, as in 新宿, which is written as Синдзуку (Sindzuku) instead of Шинджуку (Shinjuku).
- xnikitin 10mo agoMinor corrections: 1. It's "Polivanov", not "Polianov". 2. It's "Синдзюку", not "Синдзуку". Another example of JP→EN→RU is Nintendo's character Yoshi: By Polivanov, it should have become "Ёси" but since it came to RU via EN, it is written as "Йоши".
- apflkx 10mo agoThanks for the correction! しんじゅく (Cиндзюку, Sindzyuku) is an interesting case, as it has both し and じゅ in it. This is where Polivanov is similar to Kunrei. OTOH, Fukushima is cyrillized as Фукусима (Fukusima), where the ふ is a fu in Hepburn, hu in Kunrei and fu in Polivanov but し is not shi as in Hepburn, but si as in Kunrei.
- nephihaha 10mo agoThe current Romaji system is pretty decent, unlike Pinyin or the Korean transliteration system... Or Arabic romanisation which seems to be all over the place. (Yes, I know Arabic is an abjad.)
- dhruv3006 10mo agoI read romantic rules.
- elif 10mo agoAwesome. Learning Japanese as an English speaker was already ridiculously overcomplicated. So pumped to do it all over again.
- SpecialistK 10mo agoI think it's your English-language comprehension which needs some brushing up. The only change here is that the Japanese government is moving to the same romanization system that most people and businesses already use. And if you've already learned Japanese, including kanji and kana, nothing changes at all.