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Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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> 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.

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.

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

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