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Comment by pilaf | Hacker News Reader

Tokyo Metro romanizes 日本橋 as Nihombashi, you can look up the station on Google Maps and check out the photos, the signage showing "Nihombashi" shows up pretty soon.

Google Maps itself also romanizes it as Nihombashi. Same applies to 神保町 (Jimbōchō), for instance.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/5gDMNmqJwsHTsEUk8

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You're perfectly right and it's what occurred to me when I lived in Japan, too: you do get to see 'abberant' spellings quite often and that's because train companies decided many, many decades ago on what system to employ for their English station names, and those stuck of course because of printed schedules and so on. Depending on how you count Nihombashi either gets lots of points b/c of the many people who get to see this particular name each day, or it just gets a single point because it's one spot on the map. Observe that when you click through the pictures to get to the actual map—you'll find "Nihonbashi Bridge" spelled in the more common way (including the adorable repetition). So arguably 'Nihonbashi' it is in general but the station name is spelled with an 'm'.

Yeah I think you're right, unless you often visit those places it's more common to just see their names only when you pass by their train stations or see them on the train maps, so the "mb" spellings stand out more.

Try not to get peeve-hooked by it but take it as an expression of the democratic, open societies that the folks in S Korea, Taiwan and Japan try to be and the jumble that is the many divergent transcription systems becomes a way to express their freedom...

Try Thailand. People will just make up whatever romanisation they want to. "Fookoosheema" would definitely happen there. They also sometimes randomly throw in an r, not exactly sure why (maybe hypercorrection, because casual speech tends to drop rs).

The 'r' is to the best of my understanding not thrown in randomly but a reflection of British spelling. British being a non-rhotic dialect of English doesn't sound post-vocalic, pre-consonantal 'r's. Hence in spellings like 'Vajiralongkorn' the 'r' just serves to indicate a long o [ɔː] which contrasts with the short o [o] of 'long'.

That's part of it but doesn't explain why Phat khaprao is sometimes spelled as phat krapow or similar. Although maybe that's just non-Thais mixing it up.

I asked Copilot:

> "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.

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