Wāpuro rōmaji

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Japanese writing

Uses

Rōmaji ローマ字

Wāpuro rōmaji (ワープロローマ字, Wāpuro rōmaji^?), or kana spelling, is a style of romanization of Japanese originally devised for entering Japanese into word processors (wādo purosessā, often abbreviated wāpuro) while using a Western QWERTY keyboard.

In Japanese, the more formal name is rōmaji kana henkan (ローマ字仮名変換, rōmaji kana henkan^?), literally "Roman character kana conversion". One conversion method has been standardized as JIS X 4063:2000 (Keystroke to KANA Transfer Method Using Latin Letter Key for Japanese Input Method).

Wāpuro rōmaji is now frequently employed in general-purpose computer input as well as word processing, but the name lives on. Wāpuro-style romanizations are also frequently used by native speakers of Japanese in informal contexts, as well as many fans of anime and other aspects of Japanese culture.

[edit] Spelling conventions

In practice, there are as many variants of wāpuro rōmaji as there are manufacturers of word processing and IME software. Typically all of Hepburn, Kunrei and Nihon-shiki-based romanizations are accepted, so that both si (Kunrei/Nihon-shiki) and shi (Hepburn) resolve to し. Some conventions, however, differ from standard romanizations:

Owing to the difficulty of entering diacritics like macrons or circumflexes with standard keyboards—as well as the ambiguity of ō, etc. which in Hepburn can represent either おう or おお—long vowels are almost universally entered following kana spelling rules; thus, kou for こう and kuu for くう.
By default the Nihon-shiki forms of romanization are supported. Thus du usually produces づ rather than どぅ.
Small kana can be entered by prefacing them with an x, l, or +, e.g. xa for ぁ, +u for ぅ or ltu for っ. This is commonly employed for modern katakana combinations like ティ, which would be entered texi or thi. However, certain input methods map l to r.
じゃ, じゅ, じょ may be romanized as jya, jyu and jyo respectively. This matches the kana closely, but is used by neither Nihon-shiki/Kunrei (which would be zya, zyu, zyo) nor Hepburn (ja, ju, jo).
The Hepburn spelling tchi for っち may be rejected, and cchi must be used instead.
The Hepburn spelling mma is likely to be rendered っま, not the intended んま (nma). This is not an issue for revised Hepburn, which eliminates the -mm- forms in favor of -nm-.
Moraic n, ん, is often entered as nn, although the standard n is usually also accepted.
Phonetic names can often be used for Japanese typographic symbols not found on standard keyboards. For example, in some IMEs ～ can be entered as nami or kara and an ellipsis (…) can be entered as tenten.

[edit] Phonetic accuracy

Unlike Kunrei and Hepburn, which are largely phonetic, wāpuro style is based on a one-to-one transcription of the kana. Wāpuro is thus unable to represent some distinctions observed in spoken Japanese, but not in writing, such as the difference between /oː/ (long vowel) and /oɯ/ (o+u). For example, in standard Japanese the kana おう can be pronounced in two different ways: as /oː/ meaning 'king' (王), and as /oɯ/ meaning 'to chase' (追う). Kunrei and Hepburn, which are phonetic, spell the two differently as ō and ou; however, wāpuro style renders them both as ou. Likewise, the irregularly spelled particles e へ, wa は, o を must be entered as written (he, ha and wo respectively), not as pronounced.