Talk:Romanization of Japanese/Archive 2

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An Extended Hepburn System

I am using a romanization system of my own as a Japanese input method, which I call "an extended Hepburn system." or kwakuchau hebonshiki. Please read An Extended Hepburn System and/or Japanese version with an appendix

It is a transliteration system of KANA syllabary and produces a good result especially when applied to the classical KANA script. I am not sure the system is worth reference in Wikipedia, but I think the ultimate criterion should be the system itself, its rationality or lucidity. It is dificult to measure and we assume that the widely used system is so much the better. But my system is so young. Alas! --2006 June 1

It is odd that a system of Latin alphabet, a more elaborete code than Kana, is inferior in the resolving power. None of the traditional Hepburn systems and Kunrei or Nihonshiki systemms can differentiate those sounds which are rendered differently as チ ティ ヂ ジ etc. in Kana. I know the sounds of ヂ ジ are said to be neutralized. But still Kana can be used to differentiate French and English sounds of soft 'G' for example. Pioneers of Japanese romanization systems were rationalists and did not hesitate to rid the Kana syllabary of what seemed to them redundant letters like ヰ ヱ ヲ etc. They anticipated to replace Kana syllabary with Romanized one, but what they tackled was already a defective one. And today the actual Kana syllabary is extended to cope with the influx of foreign words. My system is a trasliteration system of this extended Kana syllabary. And I worked it out always wondering to myself how Hepburn would have opted. The first step was reintroduction of 'dzu' for ヅ.--2006 June 8 kmns

I must add that 'zhi' is introduced for ジ so that 'ji' can be used exclusively for ヂ together with the stipulation that Sokuon or the syllabic stop preceding 'j' is 'd'.--2006 June 10 kmns

That's nice, but please see Wikipedia:No original research. Jpatokal 12:44, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Well, the following document was carried by the January 2003 issue (vol.22 #1) of the monthly magazine "日本語学" published by Meiji Shoin, Tokyo

http://www.halcat.com/roomazi/doc/KakutyouHebonSiki/rohmazhi.pdf

under the title of "Proposal of An Extended Hepburn System" or "Kakuchau Hebonshikino Teishau".

Another article published was carried by the #743 (March 2005) of "Roomazi Sekai" of Syadan Houzin Nippon Roomazikai, under the title of "擴張ヘボン式".--2006 June 12 kmns

My primary concern was efficiency as a Japanese input method and the original system was not provided for the medial 'h', which was rendered by a reversed apostrophe or grave accent in a later version.

The above-mentioned English document is practically the translation of the "Roomazi Sekai" article added with notes on convention when applied to classical Kana scripts.--2006 June 12 kmns

Auxilliary particles can often be recognized by the visual consonants of 'w' or medial 'h', So they can be agglutinated to the preceding word without much hindrance to reading. It is not the stipulation of the system. I only found it more comfortable not to separate particles by a space.

Here is a sample.

IROHA

       iro`a ni`o`edo chirinuruwo
       wagayo tarezo tsunenaramu
       uwino okuyama ke`u koete
       asakiyume mizhi we`imo sezu

When supposed to be read by syllable, there is no need for medial 'h'. As for the value of the diphthong-like sequence of "eu" or "e`u", read the notes on the convention.

The introduction of 'h' as a boundary marker was made in "Eigo`a Nihonzhin Kyoushidakara Woshi`erareru" published by Yousensha in April 2004.

All the three documents I have mentioned are located at ローマ字相談室 the most prestigious site about Romanization of the Japanese Language. The former arrangement of the site was institutionalized systems first and then personal or orginal systems and I appreciate it very much that this distinction was dicarded on the arrival of EHS.--2006 June 14 kmns

擴張 can be rendered either as "kwakuchau" or, if based on the so-called present-day Kana usage, "kakuchou". And "kakuchau" is a mixture of the two. This I learned from a booklet "Kana dzuka`i", a manual of the Authentic Kana Usage, which carried the syllabary table of the system. Please read ja:ノート:ローマ字論#擴張ヘボン式 --2006 November 21 kmns

Pardon my ignorance, but I fail to see the merits of this system and no one seems to actually use it ... I do not know the purpose of the above post (is it just an "FYI"?), but I would be strongly against even mentioning this romanization system in this article, let alone even considering its adoption as Wikipedia standard. CES 13:18, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for your comment. You are quite right. EHS is a newcomer. I don't think any one who uses Latin alphabet to put down Japanese Language knows it. I myself doubt the benefit of its adoption as Wikipedia standart.

It is a tranliteration system of the full set of the Kana syllabary, the first one ever proposed. I believe you cannot deny the merit of the system to differentiate チ(chi) ヂ(ji) シ(shi) ジ(zhi) ツ(tsu) ヅ(dzu) ス(su) ズ(zu) ティ(ti) ディ(di) トゥ(tu) ドゥ(du). But it is not almighty and cannot handle such awkward sequences of シィ or ジィ. Superiorty of the system is evident when it comes to the problem of the classical Japanese. But it is neutral as to Kana usages. The problem is not so much as transcription/trasnliteration but which Kana usage should be chosen as the basis, the so-called Gendai usage (the Present-day or apres-guerre Kana usage imposed by the Government, a synchronic one) or the Old one (the traditional/classical, a panchronic one).

The following lines show three ways of rendering; transcription by the well-known Hepburn system (with no macron), trasliteration of Gendai Kana Dzuka`i by EHS, transliteration of the classical Kana by EHS. Comments are preceded by a pair of slashes.

  • 神道 shinto, shintou, shintau
  • 女王 joo, zhoou, jowau // "Au" is pronounced as that of "autumn", and "w" is a boundary marker which is realized as a bilabial semi-vowel only when immediately followed by "a".
  • 大黒(personal name) oguro, ooguro, o`oguro // The reversed apostrophe is a medial "h" which is realized as a bilabial semi-vowel only when immediately followed by "a".
  • 蝶 cho, chou, te`u // "Eu" or "e`u" is pronounced as that of "Europe" and palatalizes the immediately preceding alveolar.

Kmns tsw 01:57, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

Here is another example. 稲妻 is イナヅマ in the classical Kana script but it can be either イナズマ or イナヅマ in Gendai Kana Dzuka`i. Both ズ and ヅ are "zu" in the conventional Hepburn system. So the line would be rather clumsy as follows.

  • 稲妻 inazuma, inazuma/inadzuma, inadzuma

It is not an exception, but a principle because Gendai Kana Dzuka`i is founded on the spell-as-you-pronounce-it basis and orthographical concern is beyond the pale. And I think the diffenrence between falterting Kana spellings would not come out while you stick to the traditional Hepburn system. Kmns tsw 12:58, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

You've clearly spent quite a bit of time with this romanization system, but with all due respect, the point of this talk page isn't to discuss romanization systems per se, but to discuss how this article can be improved. Perhaps you might consider using your user page to expand upon your romanization system? CES 14:18, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for your suggestion. My posting is FYI. I understand Romanization of the Japanese Language has a history of controversies of more than 120 years and has not arrived at a decisive conclusion yet. It is an issue of knowledge and/or reasoning, not of opinion, and I think a coclusion satisfying all participants is not impossible if they are open-minded. In such projects as Wikipedia, it would sometimes be necessary to discuss the subject per se in the meantime. Kmns tsw 02:16, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

I wrote a little about the manual of style (Japan-related articles) in ja:ノート:ローマ字論#英語 wikipedia の場合. Kmns tsw 02:52, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

First romanization

Where is a table describing the Portuguese missionaries romanization system? WhisperToMe 23:38, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Your question is still unanswered after all these months. I don't know the answer either. The authoritative work was the Japanese-Portuguese Dictionary 日葡辞書 (there's an article in the Japanese Wikipedia) of 1603-04, rather later than the first missionaries. If there's a facsimile copy available it would be great for Wikisource. Fg2 22:06, May 2, 2005 (UTC)
I just started the article Japanese-Portuguese Dictionary of 1603. Fg2 02:43, May 3, 2005 (UTC)

I have just added a bit about the secular romanized books published by the Jesuits, and a reference to Chibbett Jimbreen 04:37, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I have "Vocabvlario da Lingoa de Iapam" (日葡辞書, 1603), "Arte da Lingoa de Iapam" (日本文典, 1604), and "Arte Breve da Lingoa Iapoa" (日本小文典, 1620). A while back I created a comparison of the different romanization systems used for personal use. I'll try to add it here soon. Bendono 00:58, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

You can see a tentaive table of Portuguese missionaries romanization at ja:ノート:日葡辞書#日葡辭書のローマ字表. The records are separated either by a newline or a slash. Each record consists of two fields separated by a colon. The right field is a transliteration of KANA by EHS (Extended Hepburn system). and the left field shows the Portuguese missionaries romanization. (The accent mark breve is replaced by the macron there). I tried to write it here, but failed. Kmns tsw 08:05, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

Archaic Variants: Ye, Yi

It says that Japanese doesn't have kana for Ye and Yi but it actually does, they're just not standard Japanese anymore. The explanation of how Ebisu became Yebisu just by adding a "Y" makes not much sense... Ebisu has been traditionally written ヱビス or ゑびす. In older times there was a difference in pronunciation between so-called "ye" and "e", but this was not existent anymore when the ヱ and ゑ kana's were finally abolished. Still though, the Ebisu Beer company uses the traditional spelling (in Japanese) and thus it is often transcribed using YE. And the old city of Edo has also been spelled ゑど so a transcription of the old version of the word would obviously result in Yedo. So it didn't go from E to YE, but the other way around. Some revision on this part please. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by SuperMidget (talk • contribs) 2006 May 7 02:26 (UTC).

Oddly enough, that doesn't quite seem to be the case: ゑ is the old kana for we, not ye. As I understand it [1] [2], by the time anyone started romanizing Japanese for Anglophones, the Japanese w was already no longer pronounced anywhere save before a. The use of ye at the time is probably just a kana-bijective choice of romanization. It'd be nice if I could find a clearer reference; I'm having to piece together snippets from various pages. Still, I've updated to reference the kana and the sound change. --Aponar Kestrel (talk) 19:00, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
Actually, it's because the we kana was used as an alternative to the e kana. Being that ye is now pronounced and written with e kana is probably the reason. --FlareNUKE 05:02, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for editing this part of the page, and correcting this mistake. I'll correct one thing though it says 'the Kanji' we instead of 'the syllable'. -- SuperMidget 15:45, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

Romaji is not only romanization of Japanese

If romaji should be a redirect to this article, there needs to be a better definition of Romaji. With the current redirect, people could be mistaken to think romaji is only the represantation of Japanese words in romaji, which is not true (see the disambig page on romaji in Jap wikipedia also the ラテン文字 article). Mackan 03:07, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia in Romaji

I wish to make a proposal and i hope that this idea will be acceptable. Would be possible to create a Wikipedia totally in Romaji?

Why? --FlareNUKE 00:06, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
There exists at least a two-digit number of Wikipedias written in a Latin script already... (or do you mean a Wikipedia written entirely in Romanized Japanese?) ;-) 惑乱 分からん 23:16, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Spacing?

This article needs information about where spaces are normally inserted when romanizing. Between words/kanji? One or both sides of particles? Before suffixes? Japanese uses far fewer spaces than languages written in the Latin alphabet. The language itself doesn't contain information about where spaces should be added. Wipe 19:01, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

New edit

Re: "Romanized Japanese is commonly referred to as rōmaji (ローマ字?), an abbreviation of the full term rōmaji-tsuzuri (ローマ字綴り?). The word rōmaji itself literally refers to the Latin alphabet."

I think this is a misguided argument. When you say ローマ字で書く you mean "to write in the Latin alphabet," in which case ローマ字綴りで書く "to write the Latin alphabet spelling" and ローマ字綴りを使う "to use the Latin alphabet spelling" yield exactly the same meaning. In other words, I don't believe this is an unqualified abbreviation, because in use the word does just refer to the Latin alphabet in most cases. Dekimasu 00:13, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

I agree that this is misguided. There are certainly cases where 'romaji' is used in japanese to mean rōmaji-tsuzuri, but in these cases the use is clear (as clear as Japanese can be, anyway) from context, and thus doesn't really qualify as an abbreviation. The new edit should be reverted. Olof

In Japanese dictionaries, Rōmaji = eiji (英字 ie English letter) = Raten-moji (Latin alphabet). But in our ordinary usage, they are different. We use Rōmaji for Romanization of Japanese. Eiji for English letters. Ratem-moji for genaral. Eiji-Shimbun (英字新聞) never means newspaper in Romanization of Japanese, but that in English. Rōmaji-shimbun never means newspaper in English, but that in Romanization of Japanese. Usage of rōmaji-tsuzuri is very rare. Only 3390 hits in Google [[3]] Rōmaji has 3,960,000 hits. [[4]] So almost all usages of Rōmaji imply romanization of Japanese. So sentense,
>All Japanese who have attended elementary school since World War II have been taught to read and write using the Latin alphabet.
is very ambiguous. In Japanese elementary school, we learn romanization of Japanese. In junior high school we learn English. TO avoid ambiguity we would like to chage "the Latin alphabet" to "romanization of Japanese".--RedDragon 05:21, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
I understand what you're saying, and I'm not going to argue with the new phrasing, but it wasn't very ambiguous. The reason is that no one would go out of the way to say "read and write using the Latin alphabet" if the intended meaning was "read and write English". Eiji is not relevant to the discussion, and "Latin alphabet" is the only real way to translate "Rōmaji" into English because English doesn't make any Roman/Latin distinction (they are the same, after all). Dekimasu 15:12, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
This is the point. You said "read and write using the Latin alphabet" means "read and write English". If so it is not ambiguous. It is incorrect. We learn Romanization of Jpanese in elementary school. We did not learn English in elementary school.--RedDragon 01:48, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
No, I didn't say they are the same. I meant that "read and write using the Latin alphabet" technically includes reading and writing in English, just like the Ratenmoji usage you were talking about, but that no one would phrase the sentence that way if referring to English. So, the previous wording was ambiguous if you translate it directly into Japanese and apply Japanese usage, but it wasn't ambiguous if you apply English usage patterns to the English text. Dekimasu 03:36, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

"read and write using the Latin alphabet"

I changed "read and write using the Latin alphabet" to "read and write using Romanization of Japanese" several times. But reverted everytime. I think "read and write using the Latin alphabet" is ambiguous. This implies,

  1. "read and write English" and
  2. "rean and write Romanization of Japanese"

But you prefer to say "read and write using the Latin alphabet". And reverted every times, and will be reverted soon. Why do you like this wording?--RedDragon 06:50, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

You don't read and write "Romanization of Japanese", you read and write romanized Japanese. You can also write in or using rōmaji/romanized Japanese/the Latin alphabet. I agree that the emphasis should be on romanized Japanese and not just the Latin alphabet, because reading and writing using the alphabet could also refer to reading and writing English, for example. Wipe 09:30, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
I have made it "romanized Japanese" as suggested by Wipe. As I stated above, no one would use that phrasing to refer to English. Anyway, English has no more of a special relationship with the Latin alphabet than any other language that uses it. It was there because it is actually a concise way of making clear, to anyone who doesn't know, what it is that "romanization" entails - the use of the Latin alphabet. Dekimasu 09:39, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
Although I don't really care what the article says, I'll remark that, to me, a native English speaker, "read and write using the Latin alphabet" does not mean "read and write English". It means nothing more than it says: writing using the Latin alphabet. The context makes it obvious that what's being written in the alphabet is Japanese, because (as stated above) if we intended to say "read and write English", it would be phrased that way, not as "read and write using the Latin alphabet". - furrykef (Talk at me) 07:36, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Capital letters

Some people use capital letters to represent katakana, while lowercase letters to represent hiragana. For example:

watashi wa SUUPAA ni ikimasu. (I am going to the supermarket.)

Is this a standard anywhere? Should it be mentioned in the article? 66.92.144.74 21:24, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

The only place I've ever seen this was in some elementary Japanese textbooks that used roomaji. I think it is rare because there is not so much need to romanize katakana words, there's no difference in pronunciation, capital letters are already used to indicate proper nouns, acronyms and start of sentences etc., and it is simply unaesthetic as all-caps is harder for the eyes and its use in warning signs etc. makes any all-caps words in normal text look like "shouting". -- 82.103.215.236 21:31, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Purpose

I added a few additional uses for romaji -- despite the common prejudice, it does see use outside of textbooks for foreigners.

A few things...

Now, I know very little about Japanese, so if I'm wrong just say so.

That aside...

1 - I've heard the romaji of katakana called Katakana English many times, but no reference to this term is made.

2 - In the "Alphabet letter names in Japanese" section, I believe the letter Z is zetto not zeddo.

3 - Long vowels don't necessarily need the line over top. I've seen many romaji words with long vowels without the symbol, and some long vowels are translated at a double vowel (which can be awkward when there is a long 'o' sound). Some mention of these other styles of translation should be made. For example, student can be written as kyoshuusei, kyoushuusei, kyōshuusei, and I've seen (rarely) kyooshuusei.

4 - Romaji is often mistakenly writen/pronounced 'romanji'. There should be a note of this in the article to alleviate confusion. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.89.253.231 (talk) 20:21, 8 December 2006 (UTC).

1 カタカナ英語Katakana English has two meaneings as in [[5]].
  1. Pronunciation of English as if it is written in katakana.
  2. 和製英語 See Wasei-eigo.
2 In Japanese dictionary, I found "zetto"ゼット. But "zeddo"ゼッド is widely used and accepted as "correct" English pronunciation. Yes we know ジー"jii" is more "correct" also.:-)
If you listen closely, you'll notice that a lot of people devoice the consonant in the final syllable in these loanwords. I've heard ベット for "bed" and バック for "(hand)bag". There should be a citation floating around somewhere...all things in time! --RJCraig 19:25, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
While I'm not familiar with the phenomenon in practice (i.e., I haven't witnessed it much for myself, nor do I have any citations), I can explain why it happens: native Japanese words do not have doubled voiced consonants (except 'n' and 'm'), so it doesn't surprise me that doubled consonants would be devoiced at least sometimes. - furrykef (Talk at me) 08:43, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
4 I did not know but some people use ローマン字. [[6]]--RedDragon 14:46, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
The first time I ever saw this alternative spelling (in English) was here on WP. About 155,000 Ghits for the version with 'n', 3,440,000 Ghits for that without...that's 4% or so? --RJCraig 19:25, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

5 - I'd like to see a cite for the claim that the Hepburn system has been criticized for making Japanese difficult to teach. Not that I don't agree - I know nothing about it - but it's currently an unsupported claim. Hmoulding 03:50, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Looks like that's been taken care of - furrykef (Talk at me) 08:43, 5 March 2007 (UTC)