Talk:Nihon-shiki romanization

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Nihon-shiki uses ō for both おお and おう. Doesn't that contridict the statement that it "allows lossless mapping to and from kana"?

Zeimusu 14:41, 2004 Apr 17 (UTC)

Kunrei allows (and AFAIK even recommends) "Oo" for initial long O, which is the only place you'll find おお; are you sure Nihonshiki doesn't? Jpatokal 09:53, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Actually, 'tis not true. Long o written as oo instead of ou isn't limited just for initials (see below, 通る, for instance). Of course, if oo is allowed instead of ô in this case, it isn't a problem... If not, however, the clause about lossless mapping is simply untrue. How is it, then? I don't know. --213.186.250.141 07:09, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
Original Nihon-shiki [[1]] said nothing about long vowels explicitely. But in example, they use 'Heimen' and 'shikō site'. So "allows lossless mapping to and from kana" is true, but did not allows lossless mapping to and from word or sentence of kana.--RedDragon 07:51, 25 October 2006 (UTC) 　

Contents

[edit] Kwa and gwa

Relating to this: http://weblog.delacour.net/archives/2003/02/just_make_sure_you_spell_it_incorrectly.php

What about kwa and gwa? They seem to be "outdated" romanizations - How long have they been outdated? Is there any more info on kwa and gwa? WhisperToMe 00:07, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

They're obsolete forms of modern "ka" and "ga", reflecting an ancient difference in pronunciation and theoretically written くゎ and ぐゎ, but in practice absolished (AFAIK) in the post-WW2 writing reforms. About the only place you'll run into a "kwa" in English is the equally obsolete spelling "Kwannon" for Kannon (and this only in pre-WW2 sources that also speak of "Yedo" and so on).
The blog you cite is incorrect in that the existence of "kwa/gwa" is still recognized in Kunrei as well. However, since the kana combinations くゎ/ぐゎ are never used in the modern Japanese, there's no need to transliterate them either... Jpatokal 00:24, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Long OH sound

I've had several confusing conversations with native speakers of Japanese over the years, trying to clarify the spelling of words like shoyu (soy sauce), Tokyo, etc.

Are おう and おお used interchangeably, or what? --Uncle Ed 16:28, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

Well, both resolve to long o. Some words are spelled "o-u" and some "o-o". WhisperToMe 17:59, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

They are not interchangeable in Japanese; which is correct depends on the word. おお is generally a kun-yomi (i.e. Japanese) reading, so you have おおきい, とおい, etc. It also appears when you have a character ending in "o" followed by a character beginning in "o," as in the place names ひろお and みのお.
おう is usually an on-yomi (i.e. Chinese-derived) reading, e.g. おうさま (王様), たいおう (対応), although it also shows up as a conjugation of verbs ending in う (e.g. 会おう). This is why you have To-u-kyo-u and Kyo-u-to, but O-o-sa-ka... Tokyo and Kyoto are both on-yomi readings, while Osaka is kun-yomi.
Francis Drohan's book A Handbook of Japanese Usage has a nice little list of common おお words. - Sekicho 23:11, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Apostrophe, I think

Which is the Nihon-shiki representation for タ, チ, ツ, テ, ト, ティ, トゥ, ツァ, ツィ, ツェ, ツォ? (Hepburn's ta, chi, tsu, te, to, ti, tu, tsa, tsi, tse, tso)

—Nethac DIU, would never stop to talk here—
23:48, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Ta ti tu te to for the first five. The rest are not standard Japanese and are undefined even in Kunrei. Jpatokal 10:22, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Move?

The title doesn’t seem quite appropriate for an article in the English Wikipedia. Wouldn’t ISO 3602 Strict, for instance, work better? The same applies to Kunrei-shiki Rōmaji, which would be ISO 3602 then. Christoph Päper 15:35, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Kunrei and Nihonshiki are much better known under those names than by the ISO code — which is unsurprising, as the Japanese names predate the ISO label by nearly a hundred years. Jpatokal 02:41, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
Maybe, but it’s not like there was one intuitive canonical name or written form: Ni[pp|h]on[-| |]s[h]iki[ [R|r][o|ō|ô]ma[j|z]i| romani[z|s]ation]. Combining the most common spellings (on WP), revised Hepburn and US, proper titles might as well be Nippon romanization and Kunrei romanization. Christoph Päper 13:17, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
"Nippon romanization" gets 16 (sixteen) Google hits, vs. 1620 for "Nippon-shiki" and 635 for "Nihon-shiki". Jpatokal 16:48, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
I get different numbers, but the same order of magnitude, but to be fair you should have compared “Nippon romanization” to “Nihon-shiki Rōmaji”, i.e. the actual current title of this article (and exclude Wikipedia from the search, but add transcription variants if you want).[2] That number is just as small – whatever this tells anyone. Christoph Päper 01:47, 22 August 2007 (UTC)