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Curiously enough, Hepburn romanization fixes some ambiguities in Japanese (Japanese written in kana alone) while introducing others. The ō in Hepburn could cor

Curiously 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 11mo ago
Use Ruby text alongside kanji, maybe?
- sdovan1 11mo ago
  FWIW, 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 11mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_character https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_character
Macha 11mo ago
What'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.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
juancn 11mo ago
The ō in Hepburn could correspond to おう or おお or オー. That's an ambiguity. What's the issue here? They all sound exactly the same, although おお seems unusual. The choice of kana kinda depends on the what you're writing.
- timr 11mo ago
  They’re not the same. おう is discernible from おお, and the difference can be important. That said, this is far from the most important problem in Japanese pronunciation for westerners, and at speed the distinction between them can become very subtle.
  - jhanschoo 11mo ago
    Do you have an academic source that describes this difference in pronunciation in native speakers in normal usage?
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
  - rokob 11mo ago
    I’m new to the language and thought these would be the same. But I just listened to some words with the two and the おお definitely has like a bigger o sound. That’s quite subtle.
    - timr 11mo ago
      You’ll hear it more easily with time. It’s hard to completely separate stuff like this from context (i.e. it’s far more rare to have a collision in sound that makes sense if you know the rest of the sentence), but it does matter for discriminating between words when you’re trying to look words up, for example.
      - kazinator 11mo ago
        I've never heard of the /o:/ of おう and おお being different. I've never seen a small child, or foreign speaker, being corrected in this matter; i.e that they are using the wrong /o:/ for the word and should make it sound like this instead. This is literally not a thing that exists outside of some foreigners' imaginations. You will sooner hear a difference from $1000 speaker cables before you hear this, and it will only be if you are the one who paid. You may be letting by pitch accent deceive you. In words that contain /o:/ it's possible for that to be a pitch boundary so that pitch rises during the /o:/ and that can contrast against another /o:/ word where that doesn't happen. The 頬 word in Japanese is "kinda funny" in that it has a ほお variant and a ほほ variant. It has always stood out in my mind as peculiar. I'd swear I've heard an in-between "ほ・お" that sound somewhat reminiscent of "uh oh", with a bit of a volume dip or little stop that makes it sound like two /o/ vowels. It could be that the speaker intends ほほ, but the second /h/ sound is not articulated clearly. It may even be that the ほほ spelling was invented to try to represent this situation (which is a wild guess, based on zero research). In any case, the situation with that cheeky little word doesn't establish anything general about おお/こお/そお/とお... I've been fooled by my imagination. For instance, many years ago I thought I would swear that I heard the object marker を sound like "WO" in some songs; i.e. exactly how it typed in romaji-based input methods, because it belongs to the わ group. Like "kimi-o" sounding like "kimi-wo". Today I'm convinced it is just a kind of 空耳 (soramimi). Or the artifact of /i/ followed by /o/ without interruption, becoming a dipthong that passes through /u/: it may be real, but unintentional. It's one of those things that if you convince yourself is real, you will tend to interpret what you are hearing in favor of that. E.g. in Moriama Naotarō's "Kisetsu no mado de" (季節の窓で), right in the first verse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FjvNqg3034 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FjvNqg3034 That's actually a good example because there are so many covers of that, you can see whether you hear the "whoopy wo" from differnt speakers. There is a similar situation in the pronunication o 千円. There is a ghost "ye" that appears to the foreign ear. To the point that we have developed the exonym "yen" for the Japanese currency!!! The reality is more like that the /n/ is nasalized, similarly to what happens when it is followed by /g/. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ONt6a1o-hg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ONt6a1o-hg OK, finally, let's crack open the a 1998 edition of the the NHK日本語撥音辞典. On pages 832-833, we have all the /ho:/ words, with their pronunications including pitch accents: ホー with falling accent after ホ: 方、砲、鵬、朴 And, our cheeky word 頬 gets a separate entry here due to its pronunications ホー and ほほ。Both have a falling pitch after the leading ほ, like 方. No difference is noted. ホー with pitch rising at the "o": 法、報 So of course if you compare someone saying 法律 vs 頬, there will be a difference. But a lot of longer ほお words have the same rising pitch like 法. 法律 (ほうりつ） vs 放り出す（ほおりだす）is the same. Fairly intuitively, 頬張る（ほおばる）has rising pitch at the お、in spite of 頬 by itself exhibiting falling pitch.
ursAxZA 11mo ago
> There are curiosities like karaage which is "kara" (crust) + "age" (fried thing). Slightly off-topic, but “karaage” (kara + age) isn’t “crust + frying.” The kara comes from a country name and refers to a style of cooking — it’s a “country-name + cooking method” compound. this is the commonly accepted explanation, though whether it’s strictly historical or a later interpretation is still debated. If you fry something without coating it, that’s usually called “su” (plain) + “age” (frying) instead.
- sho 11mo ago
  > The kara comes from a country name and refers to a style of cooking My understanding is that the exact etymology is unknown. It's often written with the letter that references the tang dynasty, but the thing is there's no particular reason to think the Chinese introduced the style of cooking to Japan - although it is true that there was such a thing as fried chicken in 7th century China! Another kanji-ization of the word uses the kara from karate (meaning air or empty, in karate it's "empty hand") and I find this equally plausible as karaage is fried with a very small amount of batter ("in air"). Either way they're both essentially competing "kanji backronyms" seeking to retcon an existing word as spoken; there's no real right or wrong answer.
- kazinator 11mo ago
  I somehow always keep forgetting that the kara part is that kanji that looks like the one for sugar without the kome hen. Still, that sort of thing in general still leaves room for it having been word play. Like tempura being originally from Portuguese, having nothing to do with 天. Japanese spelling often plays gaslighting head games.
innocentoldguy 11mo ago
> In Japanese, an E column kana followed by I sometimes makes a long E, like in 先生 (sen + sei -> sensē). While it is sometimes difficult to discern the combined E and I sound, especially for non-native speakers, the word 先生 (sensei) is technically pronounced "sensei" and should be spelled that way to distinguish it from words with long E sounds, such as ええ (ee) and お姉さん (oneesan). Similarly, the OU in 東京 (toukyou) and the OO in 大きな (ookina) are different and should be spelled differently. I hope this helps. EDIT: Added a comma.
- kazinator 11mo ago
  Sure, and in a Japanese song, "sensei" can yield four beats or notes SE/N/SE/I. But spelling out and singing aren't normal speech. Spelling/singing can break apart diphthongs, like NAI becomes NA-I. 生 is not written with い due to the /e:/ having a different sound from that one in from おねえさん. It does not (when you aren't spelling). It is written the way it is for ancient historic reasons. > Similarly, the OU in 東京 (toukyou) and the OO in 大きな (ookina) are different No, they are't. > I hope this helps. こう言うバカな戯言は少しも誰にも役に立つはずないんだぜ。
  - innocentoldguy 11mo ago
    We are talking about writing/spelling, aren't we? Why would you want to confuse the hell out of those learning Japanese by spelling せんせい (sensei) using an E with a macron, a la "sensē," when that is not at all how you spell it or type in phonetically in an IME? Having a one-to-one romanization for each Hiragana phonetic is far more logical for learners, who are essentially the target of romanized Japanese, than creating a Hooked on Phonics version that is completely disconnected from writing reality. I also think your comment, written in Japanese, saying, "This stupid nonsense isn't going to be of any use to anyone," is both ignorant and uncalled for.
    - ursAxZA 11mo ago
      In plain-text romanization, the standard and expected spelling is “sensei.” That’s the formal, conventional representation, especially for typing and learning. Phonetically, in natural speech, the vowel often compresses toward a long /e/ sound, so you may hear something closer to sense or sensee depending on context and speaker. In stylistic writing (e.g. light novels or dialogue), you might occasionally see phonetic renderings to reflect speech, but in formal or instructional contexts, “sensei” remains the correct and expected form. In short: • Orthography: sensei • Phonetics: can vary in actual speech • Stylistic writing: sometimes bends toward pronunciation Different layers, different purposes. I think this may mostly be a case of people talking past each other. One side is focusing on orthographic convention (how it’s written and typed), the other on phonetic realization (how it’s actually pronounced in speech). Those aren’t contradictory claims — they’re just different layers of the same thing.
presentation 11mo ago
For what it’s worth as a long time learner of Japanese, none of these ambiguities has ever confused me nor hindered my ability to be perceived as natural to native speakers, so I think that this ambiguity is not such a big deal. To me, Hepburn’s strength relative to the old government romanization is that it increases the likelihood that an English speaker will make approximately the right sound when reading some Romaji, and that people seem to prefer it in general.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]

nemomarx 11mo ago

Use Ruby text alongside kanji, maybe?

sdovan1 11mo ago
FWIW, 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 11mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_character https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_character

Macha 11mo ago

What'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.

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]

juancn 11mo ago

The ō in Hepburn could correspond to おう or おお or オー. That's an ambiguity. What's the issue here? They all sound exactly the same, although おお seems unusual. The choice of kana kinda depends on the what you're writing.

timr 11mo ago
They’re not the same. おう is discernible from おお, and the difference can be important. That said, this is far from the most important problem in Japanese pronunciation for westerners, and at speed the distinction between them can become very subtle.
- jhanschoo 11mo ago
  Do you have an academic source that describes this difference in pronunciation in native speakers in normal usage?
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
- rokob 11mo ago
  I’m new to the language and thought these would be the same. But I just listened to some words with the two and the おお definitely has like a bigger o sound. That’s quite subtle.
  - timr 11mo ago
    You’ll hear it more easily with time. It’s hard to completely separate stuff like this from context (i.e. it’s far more rare to have a collision in sound that makes sense if you know the rest of the sentence), but it does matter for discriminating between words when you’re trying to look words up, for example.
    - kazinator 11mo ago
      I've never heard of the /o:/ of おう and おお being different. I've never seen a small child, or foreign speaker, being corrected in this matter; i.e that they are using the wrong /o:/ for the word and should make it sound like this instead. This is literally not a thing that exists outside of some foreigners' imaginations. You will sooner hear a difference from $1000 speaker cables before you hear this, and it will only be if you are the one who paid. You may be letting by pitch accent deceive you. In words that contain /o:/ it's possible for that to be a pitch boundary so that pitch rises during the /o:/ and that can contrast against another /o:/ word where that doesn't happen. The 頬 word in Japanese is "kinda funny" in that it has a ほお variant and a ほほ variant. It has always stood out in my mind as peculiar. I'd swear I've heard an in-between "ほ・お" that sound somewhat reminiscent of "uh oh", with a bit of a volume dip or little stop that makes it sound like two /o/ vowels. It could be that the speaker intends ほほ, but the second /h/ sound is not articulated clearly. It may even be that the ほほ spelling was invented to try to represent this situation (which is a wild guess, based on zero research). In any case, the situation with that cheeky little word doesn't establish anything general about おお/こお/そお/とお... I've been fooled by my imagination. For instance, many years ago I thought I would swear that I heard the object marker を sound like "WO" in some songs; i.e. exactly how it typed in romaji-based input methods, because it belongs to the わ group. Like "kimi-o" sounding like "kimi-wo". Today I'm convinced it is just a kind of 空耳 (soramimi). Or the artifact of /i/ followed by /o/ without interruption, becoming a dipthong that passes through /u/: it may be real, but unintentional. It's one of those things that if you convince yourself is real, you will tend to interpret what you are hearing in favor of that. E.g. in Moriama Naotarō's "Kisetsu no mado de" (季節の窓で), right in the first verse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FjvNqg3034 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FjvNqg3034 That's actually a good example because there are so many covers of that, you can see whether you hear the "whoopy wo" from differnt speakers. There is a similar situation in the pronunication o 千円. There is a ghost "ye" that appears to the foreign ear. To the point that we have developed the exonym "yen" for the Japanese currency!!! The reality is more like that the /n/ is nasalized, similarly to what happens when it is followed by /g/. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ONt6a1o-hg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ONt6a1o-hg OK, finally, let's crack open the a 1998 edition of the the NHK日本語撥音辞典. On pages 832-833, we have all the /ho:/ words, with their pronunications including pitch accents: ホー with falling accent after ホ: 方、砲、鵬、朴 And, our cheeky word 頬 gets a separate entry here due to its pronunications ホー and ほほ。Both have a falling pitch after the leading ほ, like 方. No difference is noted. ホー with pitch rising at the "o": 法、報 So of course if you compare someone saying 法律 vs 頬, there will be a difference. But a lot of longer ほお words have the same rising pitch like 法. 法律 (ほうりつ） vs 放り出す（ほおりだす）is the same. Fairly intuitively, 頬張る（ほおばる）has rising pitch at the お、in spite of 頬 by itself exhibiting falling pitch.

ursAxZA 11mo ago

> There are curiosities like karaage which is "kara" (crust) + "age" (fried thing). Slightly off-topic, but “karaage” (kara + age) isn’t “crust + frying.” The kara comes from a country name and refers to a style of cooking — it’s a “country-name + cooking method” compound. this is the commonly accepted explanation, though whether it’s strictly historical or a later interpretation is still debated. If you fry something without coating it, that’s usually called “su” (plain) + “age” (frying) instead.

sho 11mo ago
> The kara comes from a country name and refers to a style of cooking My understanding is that the exact etymology is unknown. It's often written with the letter that references the tang dynasty, but the thing is there's no particular reason to think the Chinese introduced the style of cooking to Japan - although it is true that there was such a thing as fried chicken in 7th century China! Another kanji-ization of the word uses the kara from karate (meaning air or empty, in karate it's "empty hand") and I find this equally plausible as karaage is fried with a very small amount of batter ("in air"). Either way they're both essentially competing "kanji backronyms" seeking to retcon an existing word as spoken; there's no real right or wrong answer.
kazinator 11mo ago
I somehow always keep forgetting that the kara part is that kanji that looks like the one for sugar without the kome hen. Still, that sort of thing in general still leaves room for it having been word play. Like tempura being originally from Portuguese, having nothing to do with 天. Japanese spelling often plays gaslighting head games.

innocentoldguy 11mo ago

> In Japanese, an E column kana followed by I sometimes makes a long E, like in 先生 (sen + sei -> sensē). While it is sometimes difficult to discern the combined E and I sound, especially for non-native speakers, the word 先生 (sensei) is technically pronounced "sensei" and should be spelled that way to distinguish it from words with long E sounds, such as ええ (ee) and お姉さん (oneesan). Similarly, the OU in 東京 (toukyou) and the OO in 大きな (ookina) are different and should be spelled differently. I hope this helps. EDIT: Added a comma.

kazinator 11mo ago
Sure, and in a Japanese song, "sensei" can yield four beats or notes SE/N/SE/I. But spelling out and singing aren't normal speech. Spelling/singing can break apart diphthongs, like NAI becomes NA-I. 生 is not written with い due to the /e:/ having a different sound from that one in from おねえさん. It does not (when you aren't spelling). It is written the way it is for ancient historic reasons. > Similarly, the OU in 東京 (toukyou) and the OO in 大きな (ookina) are different No, they are't. > I hope this helps. こう言うバカな戯言は少しも誰にも役に立つはずないんだぜ。
- innocentoldguy 11mo ago
  We are talking about writing/spelling, aren't we? Why would you want to confuse the hell out of those learning Japanese by spelling せんせい (sensei) using an E with a macron, a la "sensē," when that is not at all how you spell it or type in phonetically in an IME? Having a one-to-one romanization for each Hiragana phonetic is far more logical for learners, who are essentially the target of romanized Japanese, than creating a Hooked on Phonics version that is completely disconnected from writing reality. I also think your comment, written in Japanese, saying, "This stupid nonsense isn't going to be of any use to anyone," is both ignorant and uncalled for.
  - ursAxZA 11mo ago
    In plain-text romanization, the standard and expected spelling is “sensei.” That’s the formal, conventional representation, especially for typing and learning. Phonetically, in natural speech, the vowel often compresses toward a long /e/ sound, so you may hear something closer to sense or sensee depending on context and speaker. In stylistic writing (e.g. light novels or dialogue), you might occasionally see phonetic renderings to reflect speech, but in formal or instructional contexts, “sensei” remains the correct and expected form. In short: • Orthography: sensei • Phonetics: can vary in actual speech • Stylistic writing: sometimes bends toward pronunciation Different layers, different purposes. I think this may mostly be a case of people talking past each other. One side is focusing on orthographic convention (how it’s written and typed), the other on phonetic realization (how it’s actually pronounced in speech). Those aren’t contradictory claims — they’re just different layers of the same thing.

presentation 11mo ago

For what it’s worth as a long time learner of Japanese, none of these ambiguities has ever confused me nor hindered my ability to be perceived as natural to native speakers, so I think that this ambiguity is not such a big deal. To me, Hepburn’s strength relative to the old government romanization is that it increases the likelihood that an English speaker will make approximately the right sound when reading some Romaji, and that people seem to prefer it in general.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]