Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years
japantimes.co.jp
japantimes.co.jp
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.
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-o...
[2] https://park.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/eigo/UT-Komaba-Nihongo-no-rom...
> Romanized Japanese is essentially an auxiliary device — a reading aid, if you will — and not the real thing.
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.
Assuming it is only used for reading purpose. It is actually also useful for typing in Japanese with a keyboard without kanas, though it is still mostly relevant for foreigners.
Side note: I personally like input systems that support both romanizations simultaneously, since there are shorter combinations in each one. For instance, "si" saves one letter compared to "shi", and "ju" is also easier to type compared to "zyu".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_Romanization_of_Korean
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.
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.)
Tone aside, "kounan" is pronounced as a native English speaker would pronounce the word.
港南, on the other hand, does not have a "u" sound of any kind, it's simply a long "ō", which doesn't really exist in English. The reason it's occasionally spelled with a "u" (although not in any formal standard) is because hiragana uses the letter う to indicate long o and u.
> 港南, on the other hand, does not have a "u" sound of any kind, it's simply a long "ō", which doesn't really exist in English.
Yes, that was exactly my point. It's a long vowel. The closest approximation in English is not "ko", but "kou".
I disagree that this isn't in English, however. It's an easy concept to map -- we have tons of repeated vowels -- which is why "kounan" gets the pronunciation pretty close.
Directly addressing the question I was responding to, there's no question about "ko un an" vs. "kou nan", because the former requires you to stop the airflow between the "ko" and "un" in a way that isn't natural for Japanese. Knowing that consecutive vowels will essentially always "smoosh together" allows you to pronounce the word -- so long as you know the vowel is long.
That would be lovely and possibly and attainable goal for a minimally tonal language like Japanese, but the challenge is generalizing any such system to heavily tonal languages like Hokkien, with six or seven tonal markings and additional layers of complexity like tonality rules that depend on different word boundaries and positions.
It's a shame that different shades of ink weren't invented and/or normalized sooner, because a lot of this state space could be captured using a simple convention of two stroke weights (light/heavy) by two shades of color (red black) for every glyph.
"Rubric" was an early gesture in this direction but unfortunately never escaped its original application.
きんいろ => kin'iro
きにろ => kinirohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepburn_romanization
Sounds like there's variation here, however -- see the picture of the railroad sign in the wikipedia article, which is a mishmash of different approaches.
I don't tend to dwell on romanization of words, because I just go to hiragana when there's doubt (which was my point).
>ほんい hon’i
>ほんやく hon’yaku
http://park.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/eigo/UT-Komaba-Romanization-of...
Also, where the hell did you learn your Hepburn?
The Genki books seem to not use apostrophe but a dash, since I found a PDF of it and it uses the terms "on-yomi" and "kun-yomi" to distinguish んよ (n'yo / n-yo) and にょ (nyo). It also very clearly says that った becomes "tta" right in the beginning, so I have no idea where your apostrophe usage comes from.
港南 has a very unambiguous Hepburn romanisation of kōnan, which is impossible to confuse for こなん ("konan") or こんあん ("kon'an" / "kon-an").
A glottal stop is like "uh oh", where you stop the air with your glottis.
If anything, using stress marks would be worse, because Japanese is (slightly) tonal and accents are on rare occasion used to mark them: háshi vs hashí.
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.
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.
It's made Japanese more accessible to English-speakers, at the cost of making it less accessible to those from other languages, and making romanised Japanese harder for Japanese people to write, and perhaps even indirectly impeding Japanese learning of English (which is notoriously terrible) as well. This is perhaps a good tradeoff for tourist-oriented materials, but I'm sad to see it becoming the standard.
> As a result, many Chinese people take on Westernized names to avoid the inevitable butchering, which is a bit of a shame.
Plenty of Japanese names are also butchered, whichever romanisation system you use. E.g. "Abe" is romanized that way in either system; "Mazda" and "Ohtani" are deliberately romanized "wrong" (again under either system) for English speakers to mangle them less. IMO taking up a name that's natural in the culture you're operating ends up better for everyone. (I very happily use a Japanese name in Japan rather than trying to get Japanese people to pronounce my birth name).
Only if they're English speakers! If your only language is e.g. Irish then writing that sound as "Shi" is more confusing than writing it as "Si".
> Not to mention katakana spellings and pronunciation which further confuse their learning of English. Previously you effectively had three different representations of foreign words with different spellings, this cuts it down to two which significantly decreases the cognitive overload
Maybe. Or maybe the way Hepburn creates "blurred" words that are partially English and partially Japanese causes more confusion than having a clear distinction between written English and written Japanese words that makes it easier to pronounce each one in the way appropriate to that language (i.e. fully code-switch as fluent bilingual people do).
As far as the second point, I taught English in Japan and found that while English education starts at an extremely young age, their relative skill is pretty low compared to other countries that do the same. There are a couple of reasons for this but I think further integration of English pronunciation could help in this department while also appealing to the widest swathe of tourists possible.
Another funny thing I’ve found is that the romaji JP iphone keyboard autofills kana and kanji best with hepburn inputs
I don't know, I think the real sad part is that everyone knows the casual Hepburn from Romaji popularity; Kana shall be default from a nationalistic, purist, standpoint. Mazda and Ohtani are fine, certainly better than Zhang and Nguyen situation, which are supposed to be pronounced "chan" and "gwen" but being mostly sources of confusion.
sure, maybe for english speakers an english based transliteration might be better. but i'd argue that makes it worse for everyone else.
given how irregular english pronunciation is, i find that a transliteration system is better if it is based on languages with more regular pronunciation of letters.
i don't see how chinese pinyin creates any more hurdles for foreigners in china than say german does for foreigners in germany. (to be fair, i am fluent in both english and german, so maybe i am not a good judge for this)
Certainly not worse than Kunrei-shiki. Hepburn might not be a great match to non-English languages, but it'S still a better one.
If you disagree, show me one language whose speakers would naturally pronounce "Sinzyuku" correctly.
Not one language has speakers who will naturally pronounce "Shinjuku" exactly correctly either - no two languages are alike, and it's normal and healthy to have pronunciation differences between languages natively written with the same alphabet (e.g. English speakers will naturally mispronounce many Spanish words - no-one would suggest this means Spanish spelling should change). Plenty of languages (e.g. Irish or Polish) naturally read "Sinzyuku" as something closer to the correct pronunciation than "Shinjuku", which is the only reasonable way to compare.
Taiwanese romanization is way better. It's much closer to English and more readable
There is also the issue of tones, which is the major hurdle for Westerners.
Now as to "you need to learn pinyin and it's rules". Yes, you need to learn and make some effort to pronounce a foreign language. The same goes for any language and it is unavoidable.
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.
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.
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"?
Romanization here means that Japanese text gets transcribed into Roman characters. The fact that the transcription follows English phonetics is a different thing.
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.
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.
If one's goal is to travel to Japan or to research their culture, knowledge of Japanese and/or English is required anyways. In the latter case, one will be positively surprised that there are only a few rules specific to Japanese to be learned to be able to read with some degree of accuracy.
One might object to the dominance of English as a lingua franca, but actually any other languages being the lingua franca would dominate the Romanization system as well, and that would lead to similar issues for speakers whose writing system works differently.
Kunreisiki is not a system dominated by any particular lingua franca; it's a system that directly reflects Japanese ways of writing Japanese. One could imagine e.g. a Spanish-influenced romanization system that would represent the は-line in a way that corresponded to Spanish orthography becoming popular in a world that was dominated by Spanish as a lingua franca, and that would have the same problems that Hepburn does. But Kunreisiki really is "neutral" in that sense.
Hepburn may not be an ideal match for German, but it's still a better one than Kunrei-shiki. I'm fairly sure there is no language in the world whose pronunciation of Latin letters matches the latter (hah!).
The only thing Kunrei-shiki has going for it is that it's more regular and can be more easily matched to kana. It's easier for Japanese kids to learn. But they are not the ones who are going to use it primarily.
You could use different romanization systems for each foreign language, and there are some (there is one for German where あいち is "Aitschi"), but that doesn't end up serving anyone well in a globalized world with an Internet.
I don't use Romaji much but I learned the Japanese syllabary ~35 years ago so translating Hepburn to correct pronunciation doesn't involve any conscious thought on my part.
Irish pronunciation may be local, but the orthography is very consistent. I actually felt there was a lot in common between Kunreisiki and Irish - at first blush it's very confusing for a native English speaker, but once you get over that initial reflex and read it according to its own rules it all makes sense.
> I don't use Romaji much but I learned the Japanese syllabary ~35 years ago so translating Hepburn to correct pronunciation doesn't involve any conscious thought on my part.
Right, but doing that will paper over the issues with any romanisation system. What do you find worse about Kunreisiki?
Good for tee shirts and tchotchkes.
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.
Picture of Shibuya Station's glowing sign. Caption: "the famous Tokyo shopping district known worldwide as Shibuya will be changed in its official presentation from Sibuya"
Currently, Shibuya is officially supposed to be romanized as Sibuya, but in common usage including signage it is written Shibuya.
"Amid concern the divide between official rules and common usage is causing confusion, a subcommittee of the Council for Cultural Affairs deemed it necessary to consider the revision to improve communication."
Since they want to adapt the law to match what everyone is already doing anyways, no change is to be expected.
As an example of text written by native English speakers that has these properties of being entirely logically consistent but clunky and difficult to understand, see the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
This reads that the official spelling is currently Aichi.
The Shibuya sentence is very awkward as well.
"Aichi will replace Aiti" doesn't add any clarity if it's breaking that logic. There's a reason why others also find this article hard to parse.
It's hard to parse because the Japanese system is itself a mess. The (former) official romanization rules say the name of this prefecture should be written Aiti but the official practice is to write it as Aichi because that's easier to teach to non-Japanese.
Consider that the romanization rules were (iirc) mostly originating from the ministry of education, but that ministries responsible for trade and tourism would naturally prefer to use whatever is easiest for foreign partners to deal with, and could lobby for exceptions since they're revenue centers rather than cost centers. Japan has both a professional bureaucracy under a parliamentary system and de facto one party rule, so (imho) there's much greater potential for policy balkanization of this sort.
They also make textbooks for Japanese-language learners.
My Japanese isn't good enough to read the news at speed, but I can manage TV news; there's a lot of stories that don't show up in the Japan Times until a week later. They do cover major political, economic, and crime (if it's a murder) news in a timely fashion.
English readers will more naturally expect the "before" to come first in a sentence, and then the "after", but in the article the "before" consistently comes at the end of sentences.
The government officially used the Kunrei-shiki romanization rules for decades (apparently, though this is the first time I've ever heard of it), but is soon changing to using the Hepburn romanization rules [which correspond to nearly 100% of romanized Japanese terms that anybody would ever have seen in the wild].
The "diagram" in the article doesn't help English-speaking audiences at all, so it's out of place in this article. It seems to have been lifted directly from some other source, and what's more it's kind of a badly-designed diagram to begin with: the header reads something like "change in romanization system", each of the green background terms are names, and under it on the left is that name romanized under the old system and on the right is under the new system... but the names of the systems are in the first data row instead of in the header row / a second header row. Just.. so confusing.
The station names and place-name signs, when we see them written with Latin characters, are using romanization Hepburn rules since many decades ago, shinjuku stay shinjuku.
What is happening is that at the same time, the Ministry of Education had been officially teaching different romanisation rules to the Japanese, denominated Monbusho system, which is slightly different with some latin syllables, like si (shi in Herpburn) or ti (chi in Herpburn), but now they are officially going to step towards Herpburn rules, the same as those used in the place-name signs when are written with Latin characters.