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Comment by swatson741 | Hacker News Reader

The 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.

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There's no ambiguity: in Hepburn, Konan is always "Ko-nan", you'd need to write it Kon'an if you wanted "Kon-an". Which is also unlikely in Japanese, unless you're writing about root vegetable safety 根案 or something.

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.

Wouldn't root vegetable safety be 根安?

Right you are! Clearly we need to join forces for a root vegetable safety plan: 根安案 kon'an'an.

Aren't you supposed to write out こんあん as "kon'an" and not "konan" with Hepburn?

  きんいろ => kin'iro
  きにろ => kiniro

It's こうなん, not こんあん, but apparently the hepburn romanization of こう (and other long vowels within the same morphene) is "supposed" to be represented by the accent macron (like "kō"), according to wikipedia:

https://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).

Hepburn doesn't use the apostrophe for that. The apostrophe is for words with a glottal stop like ze'tai. Or without an apostrophe as zettai is possible too.

>When ん comes before a vowel or y in the same word, put an apostrophe after the n

>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?

I used the Genki books which also use Hepburn. Simply put Hepburn mimics the English language and, the English language uses apostrophes for glottal stops. Especially if the language foreign. This is why Genki does that.

I think you have a very warped idea of how Hepburn works and your confusion is just caused by not knowing Hepburn. You would probably be better off actually looking up the rules of Hepburn instead of assuming that it's just the English language.

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").

zettai is not a glottal stop. Not sure what the term is, but it's a fricative of some sort. You're stopping the flow of air with your tongue on the back of your teeth.

A glottal stop is like "uh oh", where you stop the air with your glottis.

labiodental? err, i mean interdental? or is it alveolar? I know what you mean, like pausing half a step to put a barely perceptible extra bit of mass behind the release of the 't' sound.

There are several variations of Hepburn, but none of them uses an apostrophe for small-tsu consonants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepburn_romanization

Given 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.)

What? Isn't こう/コー supposed to be "kō" under Hepburn?

News to me! If so, that makes sense, but I rarely/never see the use of the accent mark.

No one knows how to type that character on computers and not in a lot of cases it make sense to use non-ASCII Latin alphabets

You basically still have the same problem tho. Is it Ko-un-an or Kou-nan? Without accent marks it's unclear without already knowing.

No, because you never separately voice consecutive vowels in Japanese. There's no such thing as a glottal stop.

Tone aside, "kounan" is pronounced as a native English speaker would pronounce the word.

Incorrect on both counts. 追う ou "to chase" is a simple example of separately pronounced consecutive vowels.

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.

My point was that you do not pronounce that word as "oh u". There's no glottal stop, nor are the vowels "separated". But I agree it's not a familiar concept to English speakers, nor is it easily expressed in romaji. If I were explaining it to a native English speaker who didn't know Japanese at all, I'd tell them to say "owe"...but that's not hepburn.

> 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.

> 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.)

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.

Well that depends. Are you romanizing the word while living in Tokyo or Osaka? :P

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