English-friendly Romanization system proposed for Japanese language
asahi.com
asahi.com
The main difference between the two is that Kunrei-Shiki is closer to a transliteration and captures Japanese phonology better (t->ch before i etc. being a regular sound change) while Hepburn is closer to the actual pronunciation. The latter is probably more important to tourists that don't actually plan to learn the language.
This I can not let go uncommented, all the more since I wrote something to the same effect myself, and it may, left unqualified, mislead aimlessly wandering souls.
So the classical—'core' if you will—Japanese phonology (i.e. 'speech sound systematics') has it that in the consonantal series like ka-ki-ku-ke-ko, na-ni-nu-ne-no and so on there are some predictable very obvious (and some less obvious, but still very natural) sound changes. In the 't' series which could be *ta-ti-tu-te-to we have, in fact, ta-[ci]-[tsu]-te-to, with the high vowels causing a 'melting', as it were, of the pure stop into sibilant affricates (stop + 's'-class sound).
Now, because these articulatory variants are a 100% predictable it doesn't matter—one should think!—whether one writes "Tusima" or "Tsushima" for つしま (対馬, island bw Jp & ROK), a native speaker will always say [tsuɕima] and actually have difficulties to say [tusima].
However that is not true anymore. It used to be true for 100% of the vocabulary before the 20th c, but when after the war English vocabulary came to Japan like rushing down from opened floodgates it left its mark on Japanese phonology: Now you have a language with a phonological 'core' system and a system for "new words".
The 'core system' applies to almost all words, and certainly all words that were used, say, before the war, no matter whether a given word is classified as Yamato, Kango or some flavor of Gairaigo—they all submitted to the established rules and did not (within the last 200 years anyway) influence the system.
The 'newcomers system' added to that everyday words like je-aru じぇある (JR, Japanese Railways), sumātofon スマートフォン (smartphone), tīn'ējā ティーンエージャー (teen-ager) and so on all of which violate the 'core' system. Observe that next to sumātofon スマートフォン there's also the older loan terehon テレホン (not much used anymore, it's denwa でんわ 電話 most of the time) that does still adhere to the 'core' system, and the same is true to some other words that come in two phonological flavors, not unlike words like "champagne" and "campagne" co-existing in French.
It then becomes preferable to sacrifice the systematic orthographic simplicity for phonetic fidelity. "Hukusima" was an OK spelling and 100% unambiguous only until the latter part of the 20th c, but that has changed.
Nihombashi, a district of Tokyo, has long been spelled with “m,” instead of “n,” although the consonant is followed by “b.”
Apart from the punctuation following crazy American rules going really really wrong here, the sentence does not make any sense, at all. You'll see Nihonbashi like 9 out of 10 times on the street and on the maps. Nihombashi is a minority spelling; it is indeed truer to the sound of it as the moraic nasal (written ん as in にほんばし) is not an [n] but rather an "underspecified nasal closure" than can come out as [n], [m], [ŋ] or even a sound approaching [b] depending on the surrounding sounds and the speaker. But it's a usage only followed by a minority.
Now the article says the place name has long been spelled with "m" instead of "n"—not true—and remarks that that is "although" "n" is here followed by "b"—that's wrong, the "m" is used here because the nasal precedes "b", it is a case of retrograde assimilation.
Lastly the article tries to concoct a newsworthy soup out of a bit of thin air that escaped out of a bureaucracy concerned with its own relevance. Be it said that for decades nobody except some nerds, some die-hards, some spelling enthusiasts and unhappy people forced to obey a particular set of arcane rules set up after the war has been, in the past half-century, publicly written "Hukusima" or "zyûdô" in earnest. These are totally cromulent and systematic spellings when you know the system and they're true to the Japanese phonological system, but nobody uses them. The news here is that, maybe, in the future, even fewer people may be using them, and that those who ditched the rules that only applied to some government agencies anyway can now do so without breaking the rules.
Google Maps itself also romanizes it as Nihombashi. Same applies to 神保町 (Jimbōchō), for instance.
> "phat khaprao" or "phat krapow", which one is correct Thai?
> In Thai, the correct spelling is "phat kaphrao" (ผัดกะเพรา). This dish, known for its delicious combination of stir-fried meat (often chicken, pork, or seafood) with holy basil, garlic, and chili, is a staple in Thai cuisine.
Might of course be an often-heard variant name of a popular dish.
The examples in the top table make it clear, I've never once seen judo romanized as zyûdô, it's always jūdō. Out of curiosity I asked a native Japanese speaker and although they could figure out what word it was they had never seen the former romanization either.
The title also makes it sound like a new romanization system was just created, when in fact it's just modern Hepburn, which is how everyone other than the Japanese government has been romanizing Japanese words for ages. The article does mention Hepburn to be fair, but then it makes it sound like the proposed changes are something new and not the de facto standard.
Well, it's not the de facto standard, since there are differences, for instance:
> The revision plan allows for not using any diacritic for a long vowel, as in “judo,” or adding “h,” as in “Ohtani” for the Los Angeles Dodgers star. Both are widely used internationally.
Since Japanese has simple and consistent rules for vowel pronunciation, and Japanese people aren't used to hearing much deviation from these rules, this often means what the English speaker is saying is entirely incomprehensible to them.
English speakers who want to pronounce words in any other language correctly will probably just have to get used to the fact that they need to unlearn some habits.
My point is more that this isn't really anything new. It's a fairly common way to Romanize Japanese in practice, even though it doesn't strictly follow Hepburn or Nihon-shiki. In fact, this style seems to be more widely used in the Western "fandom" world—on platforms like AniDB, Danbooru, and others—than the two "official" systems.