Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/03/02/japan/society/japan-romanization-rules-revise/

by anigbrowl • 2 years ago

96 97 2 years ago

japantimes.co.jp

retrac• 2 years ago

Many who study Japanese, probably prefer the current official system. It more closely reflects Japanese kana spellings. There are multiple ways of writing syllables like "ji" in Japanese and that's why there are multiple ways of writing it in nihonshiki romanization. There are variants of Hepburn that have the same property, but few actually write it strictly - even long vowel sounds may not be shown.

Reminds me of Mandarin romanization. Pinyin is quite logical for Mandarin speakers, and students studying the language, but misleading if you just approach it assuming English sound values. The system more closely adapted to English (Wade-Giles romanization) as actually used (no one bothers with all those apostrophes) effectively ignores a bunch of important distinctions in Mandarin.

In practice, romanization is trying to achieve two separate goals. The two goals are mutually incompatible, or at least largely work against each other.

One goal is to accurately transliterate the language according to its own internal logic. It might mirror aspects of the language's writing system, carefully distinguish between all possible sounds in that language, and it might use morphemes as the language's speakers think about them. For example, a hypothetical romanization of English might always use the letter z to write plurals, even though the actual sound varies from z ~ s depending on environment. This regularity is useful for learners of the language, for academic study, and so on.

The other goal is to make it pronounceable to someone who doesn't speak the language in question. When done for a linguistic audience, this is universally done with the International Phonetic Alphabet. But there is no commonly agreed upon way of representing any other language's sounds in English spelling. And so people end up using transliteration systems - often really complicated ones intended for specialist use - when what they really want is a simplified phonetic transcription, something that tells you how to approximately pronounce the word.

anigbrowl6• 2 years ago

Additional context: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/commentary/2024/03/06/japan/jap...

viburnum• 2 years ago

Thanks, that article is much clearer.

NooneAtAll3• 2 years ago

2 paragraphs isn't that clear

mock-possum• 2 years ago

That means terms like “shinjuku” will probably survive as retro touchstones - good vaporwave material, when people look back and say “remember when sinzuku used be spelled ‘shinjuku’ and it sounded like…”

Good for tee shirts and tchotchkes.

SllX4• 2 years ago

You've got it backwards. Shinjuku is sticking around as the official spelling, or rather becoming the official spelling by adopting Hepburn romanization. The pronunciation wouldn't be any different in either case.

laborcontract3• 2 years ago

It’s not parent. This article is either terribly written or horribly translated. The captions in the photos don’t match what said in the text and aren’t logically consistent across the article.

drtgh• 2 years ago

The article is a bit confusing, and the photo with the station's name doesn't help,

The station names and place-name signs, when we see them written with Latin characters, are using romanization Hepburn rules since many decades ago, shinjuku stay shinjuku.

What is happening is that at the same time, the Ministry of Education had been officially teaching different romanisation rules to the Japanese, denominated Monbusho system, which is slightly different with some latin syllables, like si (shi in Herpburn) or ti (chi in Herpburn), but now they are officially going to step towards Herpburn rules, the same as those used in the place-name signs when are written with Latin characters.

zzo38computer• 2 years ago

Both types of romanization are meaningful in different contexts. For English pronouncing the words such as "Shinjuku", "Fukushima", "Chichibu" are better, and are better for writing Japanese names in English text in general. However, the other system, with "Sinzyuku", "Hukusima", etc is directly according to the kana by the grid order, so its use is if you need to directly correspond to such a thing.

tkgally• 2 years ago

Good point. And "Sinzyuku" and "Hukusima" not only correspond more closely to the kana; they also match most native Japanese speakers’ mental representations of the sounds. For example, most Japanese speakers perceive the し syllable as consisting of a single consonant phoneme followed by a single vowel phoneme, so si makes more intuitive sense to them than shi. And they perceive the consonants in は and ふ as being the same, so transcribing those kana as ha and hu seems more natural than ha and fu. (This doesn’t apply to zyu for じゅ, however; ju is better.)

When I was teaching English academic writing at a Japanese university fifteen years ago, I was struck at how inconsistently the students wrote Japanese names and terms in English. They had been exposed to multiple romanization methods, and most of them couldn’t stick to just one system. I ended up writing a set of detailed guidelines for them [1, 2].

An excellent source for even more information about the intricacies of writing Japanese in English is the Japan Style Sheet [3].

[1] https://park.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/eigo/UT-Komaba-Romanization-o...

[2] https://park.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/eigo/UT-Komaba-Nihongo-no-rom...

[3] https://japanstylesheet.com/download-jss/

jinushaun• 2 years ago

I have to disagree here. Hepburn is superior unless your goal is transliteration from Roman characters to kana. From the article (which also argues against kunrei)

  > Romanized Japanese is essentially an auxiliary device — a reading aid, if you will — and not the real thing.

Romanization is for foreigners. Japanese people would read the original kana/kanji anyway

Korean went through a similar reform and I also disagree with it. Favoring transliteration (linguists and academics) over the actual sounds (everyday people) is harmful for communication.

MiguelX413• 2 years ago

⟨sh⟩ /ɕ/ is one consonant phoneme.

lifthrasiir2• 2 years ago

Korean Revised Romanization [1] also went forward with a similar logic two decades ago. It slightly prefers simpler rules for native speakers over the phonological accuracy, and it was a reasonable choice in my opinion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_Romanization_of_Korean

visarga• 2 years ago

"Shinjuku" to "Sinzyuku"? I don't like it.

kondro• 2 years ago

It’s the other way around. The government currently officially uses “Sinzyuku”

indutny• 2 years ago

Isn't it the opposite?

lmm9• 2 years ago

Sign of the worldwide dominance of English, sadly. Hepburn is utter nonsense if your native language is e.g. German or Irish - but it's popular with English monoglots who believe that their peculiar use of the Latin alphabet is somehow objectively correct, and they seem to be in ascendence these days.

zaik• 2 years ago

My native language is German and Hepburn is much closer to the correct pronunciation than Kunreishiki.

lmm9• 2 years ago

Really? German "ti" isn't super close to ち, but I found writing it "chi" just completely bizarre.

downvotetruth• 2 years ago

The Latin alphabet does not include J, U, and W, but the English alphabet does (see "Shinjuku") and this would likely be better understood as a form of Japanese spelling reform rather than "Romanization".

lmm9• 2 years ago

The Latin alphabet does not include J, U, and W, but the English alphabet does (see "Shinjuku")

Japanese does not naturally include distinct U/V letters and does not have a first-class concept that needs to be written with a J; the official way to romanize that place name is "Sinzyuku" and that's morally equivalent to a traditional-Latin "SINZYVKV". W does exist but is decidedly second-class and declining (only the "Wa" sound is really heard any more; I suspect it will go the way of obsolete phonemes like "Ye" and "We" soon enough).

this would likely be better understood as a form of Japanese spelling reform rather than "Romanization".

It makes no sense as a way of spelling Japanese. It's about standardising on anglicising Japanese instead of romanising it.

samus2• 2 years ago

Hepburn is not equal to the English spelling rules though, which are rife with inconsistencies and exceptions. Even though it doesn't match with how many language's version of the Latin alphabet works, and one might object to that, Hepburn an effective tool to get the job done. English learners wish that the rules of English orthography were that consistent!

If one's goal is to travel to Japan or to research their culture, knowledge of Japanese and/or English is required anyways. In the latter case, one will be positively surprised that there are only a few rules specific to Japanese to be learned to be able to read with some degree of accuracy.

One might object to the dominance of English as a lingua franca, but actually any other languages being the lingua franca would dominate the Romanization system as well, and that would lead to similar issues for speakers whose writing system works differently.

lmm9• 2 years ago

One might object to the dominance of English as a lingua franca, but actually any other languages being the lingua franca would dominate the Romanization system as well

Kunreisiki is not a system dominated by any particular lingua franca; it's a system that directly reflects Japanese ways of writing Japanese. One could imagine e.g. a Spanish-influenced romanization system that would represent the は-line in a way that corresponded to Spanish orthography becoming popular in a world that was dominated by Spanish as a lingua franca, and that would have the same problems that Hepburn does. But Kunreisiki really is "neutral" in that sense.

brazzy2• 2 years ago

My native language is German, and you're wrong.

Hepburn may not be an ideal match for German, but it's still a better one than Kunrei-shiki. I'm fairly sure there is no language in the world whose pronunciation of Latin letters matches the latter (hah!).

The only thing Kunrei-shiki has going for it is that it's more regular and can be more easily matched to kana. It's easier for Japanese kids to learn. But they are not the ones who are going to use it primarily.

You could use different romanization systems for each foreign language, and there are some (there is one for German where あいち is "Aitschi"), but that doesn't end up serving anyone well in a globalized world with an Internet.

anigbrowl6• 2 years ago

My native language is Irish and I disagree. If you think English pronunciation rules are odd or inconsistent, then Irish will make you cry out in pain, as dialects from less than a hundred miles away can sound wildly different.

I don't use Romaji much but I learned the Japanese syllabary ~35 years ago so translating Hepburn to correct pronunciation doesn't involve any conscious thought on my part.

lmm9• 2 years ago

My native language is Irish and I disagree. If you think English pronunciation rules are odd or inconsistent, then Irish will make you cry out in pain, as dialects from less than a hundred miles away can sound wildly different.

Irish pronunciation may be local, but the orthography is very consistent. I actually felt there was a lot in common between Kunreisiki and Irish - at first blush it's very confusing for a native English speaker, but once you get over that initial reflex and read it according to its own rules it all makes sense.

I don't use Romaji much but I learned the Japanese syllabary ~35 years ago so translating Hepburn to correct pronunciation doesn't involve any conscious thought on my part.

Right, but doing that will paper over the issues with any romanisation system. What do you find worse about Kunreisiki?

bitwize2• 2 years ago

I recognize Kunrei-shiki as the style used in Eleanor Harz Jorden's seminal Japanese textbook, Japanese: The Spoken Language. I always thought Hepburn style was more appropriate for the goals of that book: to convey spoken Japanese in a way understandable to English speakers. But I think Jorden intended for accompanying audio materials to supply a pronunciation guide. (My Japanese professor was a native speaker, and so used her own voice, not audio materials accompanying the textbook.)

swatson7414• 2 years ago

The switch to Hepburn rules is reasonable since it's the de facto style of romanization but, if they were going to go thru this sort of effort to revise their written language it seems disappointing that they wouldn't add stress marks / accent marks to their romanization.

It especially makes sense in Japanese to remove ambiguity like, 港南. Konan, naively in Hepburn. But is it Kon-an or Ko-nan? Kònan removes ambiguity.

timr6• 2 years ago

Given that the "Ko" is actually pronounced "Kou" (i.e. hold the "o" sound for a beat longer), I'm not sure how the downward accent helps? The bigger thing than "kon an" vs. "ko nan", IMO, is that the romanization rules don't capture these kinds of repeated/extended vowel combinations.

Honestly, anyone who is sufficiently capable in japanese to know that 港南 is something close to "Ko + nan" is going to know hiragana and be able deduce the onyomi readings of each (or at least, of 南, which is the most common reading of a basic kanji), and will not need romanization. The real value of the romaji is for people who know nothing of the language, and it's just weird that the common romanization leaves these important vowel details out.

(I'd personally love a unified syntax for tone that doesn't involve drawing squiggly lines over the word, or a number next to it, but that's a pretty specialized need, I think.)

Hamuko6• 2 years ago

What? Isn't こう/コー supposed to be "kō" under Hepburn?

swatson7414• 2 years ago

You basically still have the same problem tho. Is it Ko-un-an or Kou-nan? Without accent marks it's unclear without already knowing.

ChainOfFools2• 2 years ago

I'd personally love a unified syntax for tone that doesn't involve drawing squiggly lines over the word, or a number next to it, but that's a pretty specialized need, I think.)

That would be lovely and possibly and attainable goal for a minimally tonal language like Japanese, but the challenge is generalizing any such system to heavily tonal languages like Hokkien, with six or seven tonal markings and additional layers of complexity like tonality rules that depend on different word boundaries and positions.

It's a shame that different shades of ink weren't invented and/or normalized sooner, because a lot of this state space could be captured using a simple convention of two stroke weights (light/heavy) by two shades of color (red black) for every glyph.

"Rubric" was an early gesture in this direction but unfortunately never escaped its original application.

Hamuko6• 2 years ago

Aren't you supposed to write out こんあん as "kon'an" and not "konan" with Hepburn?

  きんいろ => kin'iro
  きにろ => kiniro

timr6• 2 years ago

It's こうなん, not こんあん, but apparently the hepburn romanization of こう (and other long vowels within the same morphene) is "supposed" to be represented by the accent macron (like "kō"), according to wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepburn_romanization

Sounds like there's variation here, however -- see the picture of the railroad sign in the wikipedia article, which is a mishmash of different approaches.

I don't tend to dwell on romanization of words, because I just go to hiragana when there's doubt (which was my point).

swatson7414• 2 years ago

Hepburn doesn't use the apostrophe for that. The apostrophe is for words with a glottal stop like ze'tai. Or without an apostrophe as zettai is possible too.

resolutebat3• 2 years ago

There's no ambiguity: in Hepburn, Konan is always "Ko-nan", you'd need to write it Kon'an if you wanted "Kon-an". Which is also unlikely in Japanese, unless you're writing about root vegetable safety 根案 or something.

If anything, using stress marks would be worse, because Japanese is (slightly) tonal and accents are on rare occasion used to mark them: háshi vs hashí.

Hamuko6• 2 years ago

Wouldn't root vegetable safety be 根安?

brettgo1• 2 years ago

Well that depends. Are you romanizing the word while living in Tokyo or Osaka? :P

speak_plainly• 2 years ago

I think this makes sense given the prominence and place English holds in the world.

Hepburn has made Japanese more accessible universally given its phonetic nature and relationship to English. There are many other transliteration systems out there that people are using with their local languages as well.

If you want to see the opposite approach, look at China and Pinyin. It’s made pronunciation of Chinese in English and elsewhere less intuitive. In order to pronounce Chinese words properly you need to learn Pinyin and its phonetic rules. As a result, many Chinese people take on Westernized names to avoid the inevitable butchering, which is a bit of a shame.

While Pinyin was probably the best choice for enhancing literacy in China, it has inadvertently created hurdles for foreigners. In contrast, Japan’s Hepburn system has avoided such challenges.

TulliusCicero• 2 years ago

I mean it probably helps that few, if any Japanese sounds are alien to English speakers. I've studied some Japanese, been several times, can't remember any sounds that were particularly difficult (whereas Japanese speakers definitely struggle with some English sounds, like "th" and "l").

There are intonation aspects that are hard for (native) English speakers, and the syllable speed is higher than English, but the basic sounds are straightforward to grasp.

lmm9• 2 years ago

つ is an unnatural sound for at least some English speakers, and can be hard to distinguish from す. The short/long vowel distinction is also completely alien at first (e.g. people are mostly familiar with the pronunciation of Tōkyō, but the natural reading of "Tokyo" in English would be quite different, starting with a "tock" sound).

ThePowerOfFuet• 2 years ago

Surely the fact that "Chinese" (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc) is tonal while Japanese is not is also a factor.

lifthrasiir2• 2 years ago

That sounds backwards to me. Hepburn is widespread because Japan once had a very widespread reach over the world, so much that a system tuned for westerners is inevitably going to appear. Chinese Pinyin is a much later development and widely known Chinese names are indeed written in Pinyin with minor variantions. For example, the name "Beijing" is an unaccented version of Pinyin "Běijīng", and it swiftly replaced a previous spelling "Peking" which was in use for over 4 centuries.

lmm9• 2 years ago

Hepburn has made Japanese more accessible universally given its phonetic nature and relationship to English.

It's made Japanese more accessible to English-speakers, at the cost of making it less accessible to those from other languages, and making romanised Japanese harder for Japanese people to write, and perhaps even indirectly impeding Japanese learning of English (which is notoriously terrible) as well. This is perhaps a good tradeoff for tourist-oriented materials, but I'm sad to see it becoming the standard.

As a result, many Chinese people take on Westernized names to avoid the inevitable butchering, which is a bit of a shame.

Plenty of Japanese names are also butchered, whichever romanisation system you use. E.g. "Abe" is romanized that way in either system; "Mazda" and "Ohtani" are deliberately romanized "wrong" (again under either system) for English speakers to mangle them less. IMO taking up a name that's natural in the culture you're operating ends up better for everyone. (I very happily use a Japanese name in Japan rather than trying to get Japanese people to pronounce my birth name).

baerrie2• 2 years ago

How is it harder for non-English speakers? Knowing the kana pronunciation for Sinzyuku is way harder than knowing the English pronunciation of Shinjuku for most outside of JP. Also, JP schools already teach English from grade 1 onward so if anything, seeing the English transliteration aligns way better and enforces what they are already being taught. Not to mention katakana spellings and pronunciation which further confuse their learning of English. Previously you effectively had three different representations of foreign words with different spellings, this cuts it down to two which significantly decreases the cognitive overload

numpad03• 2 years ago

Kun-rei has a learning cost and no one is paying for it. Hepburn or its close-enough "Ohtani" analogue is free due to (notoriously bad)compulsory English training as well as use of Romaji input on computers, and technical rule conformance to actual Hepburn is never questioned so it wins.

I don't know, I think the real sad part is that everyone knows the casual Hepburn from Romaji popularity; Kana shall be default from a nationalistic, purist, standpoint. Mazda and Ohtani are fine, certainly better than Zhang and Nguyen situation, which are supposed to be pronounced "chan" and "gwen" but being mostly sources of confusion.

em-bee• 2 years ago

that seems like a very anglocentric viewpoint.

sure, maybe for english speakers an english based transliteration might be better. but i'd argue that makes it worse for everyone else.

given how irregular english pronunciation is, i find that a transliteration system is better if it is based on languages with more regular pronunciation of letters.

i don't see how chinese pinyin creates any more hurdles for foreigners in china than say german does for foreigners in germany. (to be fair, i am fluent in both english and german, so maybe i am not a good judge for this)

brazzy2• 2 years ago

sure, maybe for english speakers an english based transliteration might be better. but i'd argue that makes it worse for everyone else.

Certainly not worse than Kunrei-shiki. Hepburn might not be a great match to non-English languages, but it'S still a better one.

If you disagree, show me one language whose speakers would naturally pronounce "Sinzyuku" correctly.

numpad03• 2 years ago

There's hiragana/katakana for regular transcription of spoken Japanese. I'm guessing that's slightly different situation to Chinese language which does not have a phonographic script.

PreachSoup• 2 years ago

If you want to see the opposite approach, look at China and Pinyin. It’s made pronunciation of Chinese in English and elsewhere less intuitive. In order to pronounce Chinese words properly you need to learn Pinyin and its phonetic rules. As a result, many Chinese people take on Westernized names to avoid the inevitable butchering, which is a bit of a shame.

Taiwanese romanization is way better. It's much closer to English and more readable

mytailorisrich• 2 years ago

Chinese people take Western names because Chinese are very flexible and, especially, because the Chinese naming system is quite alien to Westerners.

There is also the issue of tones, which is the major hurdle for Westerners.

Now as to "you need to learn pinyin and it's rules". Yes, you need to learn and make some effort to pronounce a foreign language. The same goes for any language and it is unavoidable.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

Interesting writeup(s) about the popular culture reasons and the more concrete technical reasons for the change.

Curious though of this move to more English-favoring mode when it seems in recent years in other countries as far as naming etc there was a move away from English/colonial/etc naming of places etc like Kiev to Kyiv (sorry that one's from Russian), and like places in India awhile back.... Similarly more use of Indigenous naming etc just off top of my head. I suppose that's formal naming and not language constructs but still.

fenomas2• 2 years ago

This is basically a case of the government removing a rule that almost nobody, including them, was really following. I guess they had it written down somewhere to use Kunrei, but like TFA says Hepburn is what's used virtually everywhere.

So, whatever system one might expect ought to be truer to the source language, the Anglicized system is the one that current native speakers find most familiar.

nbenitezl• 2 years ago

¿Romanization? But English is not a Romance language.

neilalexander• 2 years ago

Nothing to do with English. It's about the Latin or "Roman" alphabet.

worklaptopacct• 2 years ago

But it uses Roman letters which form the Latin alphabet.

Romanization here means that Japanese text gets transcribed into Roman characters. The fact that the transcription follows English phonetics is a different thing.

aidog• 2 years ago

Good. In practice the old system was taught in schools, but not really used officially. Except for people giving their names, where someones name is definitely pronounced as Shota, they would write it Syota. I just checked facebook and found quite a few people like this.

acadapter• 2 years ago

The "n" in "na" is not the same as the "n" in "ni".

However, only some consonants get this treatment, such as "sa" and "shi", because it only takes into account what a typical English speaker can distinguish.

Do they have to keep such an English-centric approach? Why not "nyi"?

z500• 2 years ago

The article says Hepburn romanization is based on English consonants readings. Maybe if they based it on Russian instead you would see them using iotated and non-iotated vowels.

dudeinjapan• 2 years ago

This reminds me of the time I dated a Japanese gal who said she worked at Footers.

wrp• 2 years ago

I wish Korea would do the same. I've taught in linguistics departments in Japan and Korea, and I've had many arguments over romanization policies.

What is the point of romanization? Who is it for? If it is for the benefit of non-speakers, then the pronunciation assigned to the Latin letters should be predictable based on common usage internationally. If it is for the benefit of native speakers...well, why? Japanese and Korean have perfectly good alphabets. It doesn't benefit Japanese or Koreans to transcribe their language into the Latin alphabet.

Pinyin is a different case. As I understand it, Pinyin was developed in the 1950s as a literacy aid for native Chinese speakers, so developers were free to be creative with the pronunciations of the letters.

Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years

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