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Comment by Hamuko | Hacker News Reader

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

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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

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