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Comment by innocentoldguy | Hacker News Reader

We are talking about writing/spelling, aren't we?

Why would you want to confuse the hell out of those learning Japanese by spelling せんせい (sensei) using an E with a macron, a la "sensē," when that is not at all how you spell it or type in phonetically in an IME? Having a one-to-one romanization for each Hiragana phonetic is far more logical for learners, who are essentially the target of romanized Japanese, than creating a Hooked on Phonics version that is completely disconnected from writing reality.

I also think your comment, written in Japanese, saying, "This stupid nonsense isn't going to be of any use to anyone," is both ignorant and uncalled for.

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In plain-text romanization, the standard and expected spelling is “sensei.” That’s the formal, conventional representation, especially for typing and learning.

Phonetically, in natural speech, the vowel often compresses toward a long /e/ sound, so you may hear something closer to sense or sensee depending on context and speaker.

In stylistic writing (e.g. light novels or dialogue), you might occasionally see phonetic renderings to reflect speech, but in formal or instructional contexts, “sensei” remains the correct and expected form.

In short:

• Orthography: sensei

• Phonetics: can vary in actual speech

• Stylistic writing: sometimes bends toward pronunciation

Different layers, different purposes.

I think this may mostly be a case of people talking past each other.

One side is focusing on orthographic convention (how it’s written and typed), the other on phonetic realization (how it’s actually pronounced in speech).

Those aren’t contradictory claims — they’re just different layers of the same thing.

That's right. That ē thing was a pretty stupid gaffe I made.

No worries, and I forgive you for the sardonic Japanese. I wish you the best.

Calling out your own mistake takes toughness.

You owned it — that matters.

Hi, ursAxZA. Yes, you're describing an "elision," which is where speakers drop or blur sounds together to make speech more fluid, like the way some people say, "Sup?" when they mean, "What's up?" or replace the T with a glottal stop in the word "mountain," as they do in Utah.

I wholeheartedly agree that it is fine to write things like "Sup?" when appropriate, such as dialogue in a novel. You see this all the time in Japanese TV, books, magazines, manga, etc. However, I disagree that elisions should dictate how we spell words in regular written communication, especially when discussing a tool meant to help non-native Japanese speakers learn the language. And as the parent poster pointed out, when singing, you would sing "se n se i" rather than "se n se e." The same is true of haiku and other instances where the morae (linguistic beats similar to syllables in English) are clearly enunciated.

As I said, sensei is technically four morae and different than "sensē," and, in my opinion, should remain that way in Romaji, it being a writing system and one method for inputting Japanese text.

Thanks for the respectful conversation. I appreciate the points you brought up.

Thanks — and yes, I think we’re essentially aligned now.

Once we separate the layers — orthography, pronunciation, and stylistic rendering — the friction mostly disappears.

Romanization is a writing system with its own conventions; speech naturally undergoes reductions and elisions; and creative writing sometimes pulls closer to the spoken register.

Different layers, different functions — and the confusion only arises when they’re collapsed into one.

Appreciate the thoughtful discussion.

> E with a macron, a la "sensē,"

Sorry, yes. That is my mistake. Hepburn doesn't use any such ē notation. Hepburn preserves えい and ええ as "ei" and "ee", conflating only "ou" and "oo" into ō (when they appear in a combination that denotes the long o:).

Some modern adaptations of his transcription do, however. E.g. Modern Japanese Grammar: A Practical Guide uses the transcription “sensee” (they consistently don’t use macrons in this book: e.g. they use oo for ō, etc.).

Hepburn didn’t write “sensē” himself because it 1880s it was still pronounced “ei”, not “ē”. If it were pronounced like it’s pronounced nowadays, you can bet he’d spell it with ē.

sugē

> Having a one-to-one romanization for each Hiragana phonetic is far more logical for learners

It depends on the learner’s (and textbook author’s) goals. Sometimes, having a phonetic transcription of the more common pronunciation is a more important consideration.

Historically, Hepburn’s transcription pre-dates Japanese orthographic reform. He was writing “kyō” back when it was spelled けふ. Having one-to-one correspondence to kana was not a goal.

So writing sensē is kinda on-brand (even if Hepburn didn’t write like this, because in his times it still wasn’t pronounced with long e).

I think most learners probably only pick up maybe 50 words before switching from romaji to kana anyway, so in the grand scheme of things the romanization's correspondence to the kana orthography isn't that important.

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