I was ready to say "oh no!" but the proposal is actually to use (a slightly modified form of) Hepburn which isn't that different from the current standard Kunrei-Shiki and most importantly makes phonetic sense. When I read "English-friendly", I thought they'd use something trying to use actual English spellings, similar to the way many people write Thai (e.g. "yum" instead of "yam"), which usually make no sense to Europeans whose main language is not English.
The main difference between the two is that Kunrei-Shiki is closer to a transliteration and captures Japanese phonology better (t->ch before i etc. being a regular sound change) while Hepburn is closer to the actual pronunciation. The latter is probably more important to tourists that don't actually plan to learn the language.
> captures Japanese phonology better (t->ch before i etc. being a regular sound change)
This I can not let go uncommented, all the more since I wrote something to the same effect myself, and it may, left unqualified, mislead aimlessly wandering souls.
So the classical—'core' if you will—Japanese phonology (i.e. 'speech sound systematics') has it that in the consonantal series like ka-ki-ku-ke-ko, na-ni-nu-ne-no and so on there are some predictable very obvious (and some less obvious, but still very natural) sound changes. In the 't' series which could be *ta-ti-tu-te-to we have, in fact, ta-[ci]-[tsu]-te-to, with the high vowels causing a 'melting', as it were, of the pure stop into sibilant affricates (stop + 's'-class sound).
Now, because these articulatory variants are a 100% predictable it doesn't matter—one should think!—whether one writes "Tusima" or "Tsushima" for つしま (対馬, island bw Jp & ROK), a native speaker will always say [tsuɕima] and actually have difficulties to say [tusima].
However that is not true anymore. It used to be true for 100% of the vocabulary before the 20th c, but when after the war English vocabulary came to Japan like rushing down from opened floodgates it left its mark on Japanese phonology: Now you have a language with a phonological 'core' system and a system for "new words".
The 'core system' applies to almost all words, and certainly all words that were used, say, before the war, no matter whether a given word is classified as Yamato, Kango or some flavor of Gairaigo—they all submitted to the established rules and did not (within the last 200 years anyway) influence the system.
The 'newcomers system' added to that everyday words like je-aru じぇある (JR, Japanese Railways), sumātofon スマートフォン (smartphone), tīn'ējā ティーンエージャー (teen-ager) and so on all of which violate the 'core' system. Observe that next to sumātofon スマートフォン there's also the older loan terehon テレホン (not much used anymore, it's denwa でんわ 電話 most of the time) that does still adhere to the 'core' system, and the same is true to some other words that come in two phonological flavors, not unlike words like "champagne" and "campagne" co-existing in French.
It then becomes preferable to sacrifice the systematic orthographic simplicity for phonetic fidelity. "Hukusima" was an OK spelling and 100% unambiguous only until the latter part of the 20th c, but that has changed.
I mean the same is true pretty much for most languages once English (or sometimes other) loanwords come into the picture. German for example doesn't technically have a "j" sound like in "John", but it's nowadays used all the time in English loanwords (some speakers might substitute "ch", which does exist in native German words, but most especially younger people don't). The letter "j" is otherwise pronounced like English "y".
I think the title (and the article to a degree) is misleading. Something like "Japanese bureaucrats finally plan to update severely out of date official romanization scheme" would be far more accurate.
The examples in the top table make it clear, I've never once seen judo romanized as zyûdô, it's always jūdō. Out of curiosity I asked a native Japanese speaker and although they could figure out what word it was they had never seen the former romanization either.
The title also makes it sound like a new romanization system was just created, when in fact it's just modern Hepburn, which is how everyone other than the Japanese government has been romanizing Japanese words for ages. The article does mention Hepburn to be fair, but then it makes it sound like the proposed changes are something new and not the de facto standard.
When typing in Japanese I tend to type "tu" instead of "tsu" or "si" instead of "shi" because the end result is the same (つ/し) and I save a keystroke, I assume most people who regularly input Japanese with a QWERTY keyboard do the same. The revised romanizaton from the article prefers "tsu" and "shi" though.
That's true—the actual IME is much more flexible than this.
My point is more that this isn't really anything new. It's a fairly common way to Romanize Japanese in practice, even though it doesn't strictly follow Hepburn or Nihon-shiki. In fact, this style seems to be more widely used in the Western "fandom" world—on platforms like AniDB, Danbooru, and others—than the two "official" systems.
May help some foreigners with the consonants, but the vowels will probably still pronounced incorrectly due to English's Great Vowel Shift. Kunreishiki will still be used in linguistics as it fit better the phonology, and some kana are easier to type this way when using alphabet input.
I don't understand, does Japan use a scheme to romanize words that is based-ish on a version of English that is long dead? That seems like a lose lose for everyone.
Japanese vowels are simple and consistent, for example 'e' is always the 'e' sound in 'bed', but (due to the history of the English language) English speakers are used to taking in the context of the vowels and pronouncing them in a variety of ways. When reading Japanese (in which the surrounding letters do not provide any hints as to how to pronounce the vowels), English speakers often end up guessing at random, sometimes pronouncing 'a' like in 'cat', sometimes pronouncing it like in 'father', etc.
Since Japanese has simple and consistent rules for vowel pronunciation, and Japanese people aren't used to hearing much deviation from these rules, this often means what the English speaker is saying is entirely incomprehensible to them.
There's simply no reasonable way to base a transcription of another writing system on English phonology because the latter is highly irregular. It would also confuse literally anyone else who uses Latin script.
English speakers who want to pronounce words in any other language correctly will probably just have to get used to the fact that they need to unlearn some habits.
A transliteration or transcription scheme that uses <ch> for [tʃ] and similar sounds and <j> for [dʒ] is obviously influenced by English habits, yes. Doesn't mean the same scheme can not use <u> for [u]...[ɯ] and <e> for [ɛ], though.
This is the most puzzling, and, apparently, puzzled, piece I've read today so far, and it's already twenty to nine a.m. Quote:
Nihombashi, a district of Tokyo, has long been spelled with “m,” instead of “n,” although the consonant is followed by “b.”
Apart from the punctuation following crazy American rules going really really wrong here, the sentence does not make any sense, at all. You'll see Nihonbashi like 9 out of 10 times on the street and on the maps. Nihombashi is a minority spelling; it is indeed truer to the sound of it as the moraic nasal (written ん as in にほんばし) is not an [n] but rather an "underspecified nasal closure" than can come out as [n], [m], [ŋ] or even a sound approaching [b] depending on the surrounding sounds and the speaker. But it's a usage only followed by a minority.
Now the article says the place name has long been spelled with "m" instead of "n"—not true—and remarks that that is "although" "n" is here followed by "b"—that's wrong, the "m" is used here because the nasal precedes "b", it is a case of retrograde assimilation.
Lastly the article tries to concoct a newsworthy soup out of a bit of thin air that escaped out of a bureaucracy concerned with its own relevance. Be it said that for decades nobody except some nerds, some die-hards, some spelling enthusiasts and unhappy people forced to obey a particular set of arcane rules set up after the war has been, in the past half-century, publicly written "Hukusima" or "zyûdô" in earnest. These are totally cromulent and systematic spellings when you know the system and they're true to the Japanese phonological system, but nobody uses them. The news here is that, maybe, in the future, even fewer people may be using them, and that those who ditched the rules that only applied to some government agencies anyway can now do so without breaking the rules.
Tokyo Metro romanizes 日本橋 as Nihombashi, you can look up the station on Google Maps and check out the photos, the signage showing "Nihombashi" shows up pretty soon.
Google Maps itself also romanizes it as Nihombashi. Same applies to 神保町 (Jimbōchō), for instance.
You're perfectly right and it's what occurred to me when I lived in Japan, too: you do get to see 'abberant' spellings quite often and that's because train companies decided many, many decades ago on what system to employ for their English station names, and those stuck of course because of printed schedules and so on. Depending on how you count Nihombashi either gets lots of points b/c of the many people who get to see this particular name each day, or it just gets a single point because it's one spot on the map. Observe that when you click through the pictures to get to the actual map—you'll find "Nihonbashi Bridge" spelled in the more common way (including the adorable repetition). So arguably 'Nihonbashi' it is in general but the station name is spelled with an 'm'.
Yeah I think you're right, unless you often visit those places it's more common to just see their names only when you pass by their train stations or see them on the train maps, so the "mb" spellings stand out more.
Try not to get peeve-hooked by it but take it as an expression of the democratic, open societies that the folks in S Korea, Taiwan and Japan try to be and the jumble that is the many divergent transcription systems becomes a way to express their freedom...
Try Thailand. People will just make up whatever romanisation they want to. "Fookoosheema" would definitely happen there. They also sometimes randomly throw in an r, not exactly sure why (maybe hypercorrection, because casual speech tends to drop rs).
The 'r' is to the best of my understanding not thrown in randomly but a reflection of British spelling. British being a non-rhotic dialect of English doesn't sound post-vocalic, pre-consonantal 'r's. Hence in spellings like 'Vajiralongkorn' the 'r' just serves to indicate a long o [ɔː] which contrasts with the short o [o] of 'long'.
That's part of it but doesn't explain why Phat khaprao is sometimes spelled as phat krapow or similar. Although maybe that's just non-Thais mixing it up.
> "phat khaprao" or "phat krapow", which one is correct Thai?
> In Thai, the correct spelling is "phat kaphrao" (ผัดกะเพรา). This dish, known for its delicious combination of stir-fried meat (often chicken, pork, or seafood) with holy basil, garlic, and chili, is a staple in Thai cuisine.
Might of course be an often-heard variant name of a popular dish.
I was ready to say "oh no!" but the proposal is actually to use (a slightly modified form of) Hepburn which isn't that different from the current standard Kunrei-Shiki and most importantly makes phonetic sense. When I read "English-friendly", I thought they'd use something trying to use actual English spellings, similar to the way many people write Thai (e.g. "yum" instead of "yam"), which usually make no sense to Europeans whose main language is not English.
The main difference between the two is that Kunrei-Shiki is closer to a transliteration and captures Japanese phonology better (t->ch before i etc. being a regular sound change) while Hepburn is closer to the actual pronunciation. The latter is probably more important to tourists that don't actually plan to learn the language.
> captures Japanese phonology better (t->ch before i etc. being a regular sound change)
This I can not let go uncommented, all the more since I wrote something to the same effect myself, and it may, left unqualified, mislead aimlessly wandering souls.
So the classical—'core' if you will—Japanese phonology (i.e. 'speech sound systematics') has it that in the consonantal series like ka-ki-ku-ke-ko, na-ni-nu-ne-no and so on there are some predictable very obvious (and some less obvious, but still very natural) sound changes. In the 't' series which could be *ta-ti-tu-te-to we have, in fact, ta-[ci]-[tsu]-te-to, with the high vowels causing a 'melting', as it were, of the pure stop into sibilant affricates (stop + 's'-class sound).
Now, because these articulatory variants are a 100% predictable it doesn't matter—one should think!—whether one writes "Tusima" or "Tsushima" for つしま (対馬, island bw Jp & ROK), a native speaker will always say [tsuɕima] and actually have difficulties to say [tusima].
However that is not true anymore. It used to be true for 100% of the vocabulary before the 20th c, but when after the war English vocabulary came to Japan like rushing down from opened floodgates it left its mark on Japanese phonology: Now you have a language with a phonological 'core' system and a system for "new words".
The 'core system' applies to almost all words, and certainly all words that were used, say, before the war, no matter whether a given word is classified as Yamato, Kango or some flavor of Gairaigo—they all submitted to the established rules and did not (within the last 200 years anyway) influence the system.
The 'newcomers system' added to that everyday words like je-aru じぇある (JR, Japanese Railways), sumātofon スマートフォン (smartphone), tīn'ējā ティーンエージャー (teen-ager) and so on all of which violate the 'core' system. Observe that next to sumātofon スマートフォン there's also the older loan terehon テレホン (not much used anymore, it's denwa でんわ 電話 most of the time) that does still adhere to the 'core' system, and the same is true to some other words that come in two phonological flavors, not unlike words like "champagne" and "campagne" co-existing in French.
It then becomes preferable to sacrifice the systematic orthographic simplicity for phonetic fidelity. "Hukusima" was an OK spelling and 100% unambiguous only until the latter part of the 20th c, but that has changed.
I mean the same is true pretty much for most languages once English (or sometimes other) loanwords come into the picture. German for example doesn't technically have a "j" sound like in "John", but it's nowadays used all the time in English loanwords (some speakers might substitute "ch", which does exist in native German words, but most especially younger people don't). The letter "j" is otherwise pronounced like English "y".
I think the title (and the article to a degree) is misleading. Something like "Japanese bureaucrats finally plan to update severely out of date official romanization scheme" would be far more accurate.
The examples in the top table make it clear, I've never once seen judo romanized as zyûdô, it's always jūdō. Out of curiosity I asked a native Japanese speaker and although they could figure out what word it was they had never seen the former romanization either.
The title also makes it sound like a new romanization system was just created, when in fact it's just modern Hepburn, which is how everyone other than the Japanese government has been romanizing Japanese words for ages. The article does mention Hepburn to be fair, but then it makes it sound like the proposed changes are something new and not the de facto standard.
Isn't it basically just Wāpuro rōmaji, i.e. how you input Japanese using romaji with a keyboard.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C4%81puro_r%C5%8Dmaji
When typing in Japanese I tend to type "tu" instead of "tsu" or "si" instead of "shi" because the end result is the same (つ/し) and I save a keystroke, I assume most people who regularly input Japanese with a QWERTY keyboard do the same. The revised romanizaton from the article prefers "tsu" and "shi" though.
That's true—the actual IME is much more flexible than this.
My point is more that this isn't really anything new. It's a fairly common way to Romanize Japanese in practice, even though it doesn't strictly follow Hepburn or Nihon-shiki. In fact, this style seems to be more widely used in the Western "fandom" world—on platforms like AniDB, Danbooru, and others—than the two "official" systems.
May help some foreigners with the consonants, but the vowels will probably still pronounced incorrectly due to English's Great Vowel Shift. Kunreishiki will still be used in linguistics as it fit better the phonology, and some kana are easier to type this way when using alphabet input.
Nobody suggested to write 'Fookoosheema', but maybe someone should... no?
I don't understand, does Japan use a scheme to romanize words that is based-ish on a version of English that is long dead? That seems like a lose lose for everyone.
Japanese vowels are simple and consistent, for example 'e' is always the 'e' sound in 'bed', but (due to the history of the English language) English speakers are used to taking in the context of the vowels and pronouncing them in a variety of ways. When reading Japanese (in which the surrounding letters do not provide any hints as to how to pronounce the vowels), English speakers often end up guessing at random, sometimes pronouncing 'a' like in 'cat', sometimes pronouncing it like in 'father', etc.
Since Japanese has simple and consistent rules for vowel pronunciation, and Japanese people aren't used to hearing much deviation from these rules, this often means what the English speaker is saying is entirely incomprehensible to them.
There's simply no reasonable way to base a transcription of another writing system on English phonology because the latter is highly irregular. It would also confuse literally anyone else who uses Latin script.
English speakers who want to pronounce words in any other language correctly will probably just have to get used to the fact that they need to unlearn some habits.
A transliteration or transcription scheme that uses <ch> for [tʃ] and similar sounds and <j> for [dʒ] is obviously influenced by English habits, yes. Doesn't mean the same scheme can not use <u> for [u]...[ɯ] and <e> for [ɛ], though.
This is the most puzzling, and, apparently, puzzled, piece I've read today so far, and it's already twenty to nine a.m. Quote:
Nihombashi, a district of Tokyo, has long been spelled with “m,” instead of “n,” although the consonant is followed by “b.”
Apart from the punctuation following crazy American rules going really really wrong here, the sentence does not make any sense, at all. You'll see Nihonbashi like 9 out of 10 times on the street and on the maps. Nihombashi is a minority spelling; it is indeed truer to the sound of it as the moraic nasal (written ん as in にほんばし) is not an [n] but rather an "underspecified nasal closure" than can come out as [n], [m], [ŋ] or even a sound approaching [b] depending on the surrounding sounds and the speaker. But it's a usage only followed by a minority.
Now the article says the place name has long been spelled with "m" instead of "n"—not true—and remarks that that is "although" "n" is here followed by "b"—that's wrong, the "m" is used here because the nasal precedes "b", it is a case of retrograde assimilation.
Lastly the article tries to concoct a newsworthy soup out of a bit of thin air that escaped out of a bureaucracy concerned with its own relevance. Be it said that for decades nobody except some nerds, some die-hards, some spelling enthusiasts and unhappy people forced to obey a particular set of arcane rules set up after the war has been, in the past half-century, publicly written "Hukusima" or "zyûdô" in earnest. These are totally cromulent and systematic spellings when you know the system and they're true to the Japanese phonological system, but nobody uses them. The news here is that, maybe, in the future, even fewer people may be using them, and that those who ditched the rules that only applied to some government agencies anyway can now do so without breaking the rules.
Tokyo Metro romanizes 日本橋 as Nihombashi, you can look up the station on Google Maps and check out the photos, the signage showing "Nihombashi" shows up pretty soon.
Google Maps itself also romanizes it as Nihombashi. Same applies to 神保町 (Jimbōchō), for instance.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/5gDMNmqJwsHTsEUk8
You're perfectly right and it's what occurred to me when I lived in Japan, too: you do get to see 'abberant' spellings quite often and that's because train companies decided many, many decades ago on what system to employ for their English station names, and those stuck of course because of printed schedules and so on. Depending on how you count Nihombashi either gets lots of points b/c of the many people who get to see this particular name each day, or it just gets a single point because it's one spot on the map. Observe that when you click through the pictures to get to the actual map—you'll find "Nihonbashi Bridge" spelled in the more common way (including the adorable repetition). So arguably 'Nihonbashi' it is in general but the station name is spelled with an 'm'.
Yeah I think you're right, unless you often visit those places it's more common to just see their names only when you pass by their train stations or see them on the train maps, so the "mb" spellings stand out more.
Try not to get peeve-hooked by it but take it as an expression of the democratic, open societies that the folks in S Korea, Taiwan and Japan try to be and the jumble that is the many divergent transcription systems becomes a way to express their freedom...
Try Thailand. People will just make up whatever romanisation they want to. "Fookoosheema" would definitely happen there. They also sometimes randomly throw in an r, not exactly sure why (maybe hypercorrection, because casual speech tends to drop rs).
The 'r' is to the best of my understanding not thrown in randomly but a reflection of British spelling. British being a non-rhotic dialect of English doesn't sound post-vocalic, pre-consonantal 'r's. Hence in spellings like 'Vajiralongkorn' the 'r' just serves to indicate a long o [ɔː] which contrasts with the short o [o] of 'long'.
That's part of it but doesn't explain why Phat khaprao is sometimes spelled as phat krapow or similar. Although maybe that's just non-Thais mixing it up.
I asked Copilot:
> "phat khaprao" or "phat krapow", which one is correct Thai?
> In Thai, the correct spelling is "phat kaphrao" (ผัดกะเพรา). This dish, known for its delicious combination of stir-fried meat (often chicken, pork, or seafood) with holy basil, garlic, and chili, is a staple in Thai cuisine.
Might of course be an often-heard variant name of a popular dish.