I live in Thailand and I cannot get over the fact that romanization is (seemingly?) completely unstandardized. Even government signage uses different English spelling of Thai words.
You should have seen Taiwan in the 1990s. It was a hot mess of older Western romanization systems, historical and dialectical exceptions, competing Taiwanese and pro-China sensibilities, a widely used international standard (pinyin), and lots of confusion in official and private circles about the proper way to write names and locations using the Latin alphabet. In 1998, the City of Taipei even made up its own Romanization system for street names at the behest of its then-new mayor, a supporter of Taiwan independence (https://pinyin.info/news/2019/article-on-early-tongyong-piny...).
The chart halfway down this blog post lays out some of the challenges once the hanyu pinyin standard was instituted in 2009:
So that’s why people in Taiwan can’t spell anything consistently and why all the English-language newspapers spell the same things differently. As for me, I’m giving up on trying to remember how everyone spells their name. I know lots of people, especially Taiwan nationalists, dislike having the PRC hanyu pinyin system. I dislike imposing it upon them. However, in only three weeks, I’ve found myself spelling the same thing in multiple ways and wasting time looking up how I did it last time. Since almost no one reads my blog anyway, I’ll do it the way that’s most convenient for me.
I’ll also always provide the Chinese characters so that people who can read them know who I’m talking about.
Yeah, my full names are Jeremia Josiah, and on my work permit they wrote the Thai version as เจอเรเมีย โยชิอา. I cannot figure out why they chose to use จ for the J in Jeremia but ย for the J in Josiah. Both are pronounced the same and I would consider จ the correct choice. I would consider ย more correct for representing a word with Y.
Korea is stuck in a funny middle ground, where names like cities or railway stations all follow the standard without exception, while personal or corporate names are in a state of total chaos. So the cell phone maker is Samsung, but the subway station in Seoul is Samseong, even though they're written and pronounced in the same way in Korean. (No, they aren't related.)
It's unfortunate but I don't think it'll get fixed any time soon. Nobody wants to be called Mr. I, O, U, An, or No. (The most common romanization for these family names would be: Lee, Oh, Woo, Ahn, and Roh.)
> It sounds way closer to the spoken sounds, at least to my western ears.
That's the thing... to some other non-English language speakers, the existing/old romanization method actually is more accurate regarding how the letters would be pronounced to them, especially coming from languages that don't have the same e.g. [ch] or [ts] sounds as written with Hepburn.
The one technical downside I would say to this change is, 1:1 machine transliteration is no longer possible with Hepburn.
You mean, if you would apply the inverse of the standard romanization of Mandarin, the resulting sound would be closer to the Japanese sound, if starting from the Kunrei spelling than if starting from the Hepburn spelling?
For pinyin representation of Mandarin, these are very different sounds, while the equivalent (identical) Mandarin pinyin representation of し, じ, つ would be xi, ji, cu. I'm not as familiar with romanization systems closer to Latin pronunciations, but for Wade Giles it would probably be written like shi, chi, tsu.
The old official system arguably makes more sense from a Japanese perspective.
If you look at the kana, the Japanese syllabic writing system, they have this ordering: ka ki ku ke ko, sa shi su se so, ta chitsu te to, etc. If you follow the regularity where there should be a "ti" sound there is no "ti" sound and it happens to be pronounced "chi".
One common analysis holds that the underlying phonemes really are: ta ti tu te to. Traditional Japanese grammarians usually analyzed it this way. And they were historically pronounced that way: it has arisen out of relatively recent sound change. Somewhat like how some British speakers pronounce "Tuesday" such that it sounds much like "Chews-day" to speakers of other dialects. Affrication in a fixed context. The t phoneme triggers that kind of affrication obligatorily in Japanese, before the i vowel or y glide.
Some disagree with this as overly theoretic and based excessively on historical linguistics, and they insist that sh and f and ch are distinct phonemes in Japanese. But the Japanese writing system itself treats it as if they were not.
If you are learning Japanese it makes sense to pick a system that reflects the internal logic of kana spelling. If you want to just approximately pronounce Japanese words in English then you want something that reflects the logic of English spelling.
These two goals are always in tension. Mandarin pinyin, for example, was designed to reflect the logic of Mandarin phonology in a consistent way. It's not meant to be easily pronounceable by English speakers. It's to enable Mandarin speakers to look up words in a dictionary or for students of the language to study Mandarin. Though it has ended up used as a pronunciation guide for English speakers. And that often doesn't go well; a lot of English speakers don't know what to do with the q's and x's.
This is the same reason why I'm disappointed that Pinyin won over Wade-Giles. If Hepburn can be acknowledged to be better than Kurei-Shiki, then Wade-Giles is also better than Pinyin. At the very least we'll no longer have to deal with words containing q that's pronounced nowhere near q. Although admittedly it does produce some exotic looking words and boon for Scrabble players.
One issue holding back the adoption of Hepburn has been that the standard national curriculum (gakushū shidō yōryō) calls for all children to be taught romaji beginning in the third grade (previously fourth grade) of elementary school. It's taught in Kokugo (national language, i.e., Japanese) classes and included in those textbooks, as romaji characters are used in Japanese alongside kana and kanji as well as, increasingly, in daily life (user names, passwords, etc.). At that age, native speakers of Japanese can acquire kunreishiki more easily, as the consonant representation corresponds more closely to the Japanese phonology that they have internalized.
I didn't really have a problem with the spoken sounds when learning in school - we were also required to take Maori lessons as well and a lot of the sounds are shared. Quite interesting really.
Edit: actually the only one I ever had an issue with was one of my homestay's names "Ryouhei"...that Ryou sound...it's like the Y stops me from rolling the R properly, so odd.
Hepburn is poorly supported in some input methods, like on Windows. If you want to type kōen or whatever, you really have to work for that ō. It's better now on mobile devices and MacOS (what I'm using now): I just long-pressed o and picked ō from a pop-up.
Curiously enough, Hepburn romanization fixes some ambiguities in Japanese (Japanese written in kana alone) while introducing others.
The ō in Hepburn could correspond to おう or おお or オー. That's an ambiguity.
Where does Hepburn disambiguate?
In Japanese, an E column kana followed by I sometimes makes a long E, like in 先生 (sen + sei -> sensē). The "SEI" is one unit. But in other situations it does not, like in a compound word ending in the E kana, where the second word starts with I. For instance 酒色 (sake + iro -> sakeiro, not sakēro).
Hepburn distinguishes these; the hiragana spelling does not!
This is one of the issues that makes it very hard to read Japanese that is written with hiragana only, rather than kanji. No word breaks and not knowing whether せい is supposed to be sē or sei.
There are curiosities like karaage which is "kara" (crust) + "age" (fried thing). A lot of the time it is pronounced as karāge, because of the way RA and A come together. Other times you hear a kind of flutter in it which articulates two A's.
I have no idea which romanization to use. Flip a coin?
For what it’s worth as a long time learner of Japanese, none of these ambiguities has ever confused me nor hindered my ability to be perceived as natural to native speakers, so I think that this ambiguity is not such a big deal.
To me, Hepburn’s strength relative to the old government romanization is that it increases the likelihood that an English speaker will make approximately the right sound when reading some Romaji, and that people seem to prefer it in general.
The language school I attended all but banned romanization. The idea was to learn, practice, and finally internalize kana and kanji as quickly as possible. Hepburn is just a band-aid when it comes to language study.
For people not interested in learning Japanese, however, a unified romanization could have its benefits. It just never struck me as particularly inconsistent to begin with, even after so many years living there.
Some background for those who aren't familiar: "Romanization" refers to converting Japanese sounds into the Latin (Roman) alphabet. In Japanese, these sounds are written with phonetic characters called kana. (There are two types of kana; I'm only going to talk about hiragana here.) Each kana represents either a vowel or a consonant followed by a vowel. For example: あ (a), こ (ko), ね (ne). Aside from a terminating n/m sound (ん), there are no characters for standalone consonants. There are five vowels (a i u e o).
The kana are usually written in a table where each row is a vowel and each column is a consonant, like on Wikipedia[1]. Most columns of the table have five characters, each representing the same consonant combined with one of the vowels. For example: か/き/く/け/こ ka/ki/ku/ke/ko, ま/み/む/め/も ma/mi/mu/me/mo. Some columns have "missing" sounds (や/ゆ/よ ya/yu/yo); but what's important for our purposes is that some columns have irregular sounds: さ/し/す/せ/そ sa/shi/su/se/so and た/ち/つ/て/と ta/chi/tsu/te/to. There are no si, ti, or tu sounds in standard Japanese; they have shi, chi, and tsu instead.
Using diacritic markings gets you more consonants. Most of these are made by adding a couple tick marks to the corner of the character, which makes the consonant voiced instead of unvoiced. For example: か ka -> が ga, と to -> ど do, ひ hi -> び bi. But the irregular sounds stay irregular: し shi -> じ ji instead of zi, ち chi -> ぢ ji (again) instead of di, and つ tsu -> づ zu instead of du. (す su -> ず zu gives the same sound but in a regular way.)
You can also combine i-vowel characters with y-consonant characters to get sounds with consonant clusters: き ki + や ya = きゃ kya, み mi + よ yo = みょ myo, etc. The irregular sounds remain irregular: し shi + ゆ yu = しゅ shu (instead of syu), ち chi + や ya = ちゃ cha (instead of tya), じ ji + よ yo = じょ jo (instead of zyo). There's a Reddit post with a nice table showing all the available sounds[2].
Now the problem for romanization is this: Should the romanization reflect the irregular sounds in the spoken language? Or should it reflect the regular groupings of the kana characters? づ and ず might both be pronounced "zu", but they come from different linguistic origins, just as "bear" and "bare" do in English. The Hepburn system uses spellings that match the sounds, while the current standard (Kunrei-shiki) uses spellings that match the kana grouping: し si (instead of shi), ち ti (instead of chi), じ zi (instead of ji), つ tu (instead of tsu), じょ syo (instead of sho), etc.
The Hepburn system tells you how to pronounce the word[3] at the cost of being a lossy encoding. For anyone familiar with the Latin alphabet, that's almost always the better choice, and it's nearly universal in the Western world. Kunrei-shiki does better reflect the underlying structure of the Japanese language and its native writing system, which is probably why the Japanese government preferred it. But anyone who wants to learn the language is going to learn the kana almost immediately (it's just a few hours with flash cards), so IMHO that's pretty small advantage.
I deliberately didn't talk about long vowels, glottal stops, the differences between hiragana and katakana, different pronunciations of ん (n), or how to handle ん (n) followed by a vowel, but if you're curious about Japanese romanization those topics may also be of interest to you. I can try to explain more if anyone's curious.
About a decade ago, I became a fan of the remarkable Japanese child prodigy drummer Kanade Sato. That lead to me to learn the surprising fact that Japan has 4 writing systems: kanji, hiragana, katakana, and romanji.
Here's the video that got me interested in Sato www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYpFL08m5fQ&list=RDXYpFL08m5fQ&start_radio=1
Is been 25 years since I took Japanese in highschool but I'm relatively certain that our textbooks had ち romanized as tchi which from my recollection seems more accurate to its actual common pronunciation.
"The council’s recommendation also adopts Hepburn spellings for し, じ and つ as shi, ji, and tsu, compared to the Kunrei spellings of si, zi and tu."
As a Westerner I know very little Japanese but having worked in Japan for a short while I take an interest in the language.
When reading this it occurred to me there might have been more reason for adopting the Hepburn spelling than stated. As as English speaker I've noticed how poorly we pronounce Japanese words and perhaps this change is also intended as a subtle way of letting us know.
English has a long tradition of stealing words from other languages then mangling them almost beyond recognition because we're too lazy to take efforts to pronounce them correctly. To me, this is a form of language arrogance.
Foe example, I've long complained about the adoption in recent decades of the word tsunami into English and then mangling its pronunciation beyond recognition.
I'm old enough to remember when 'tidal wave' was the generally accepted wording for that ocean phenomenon—now we've replaced these perfectly understandable and descriptive English words with tsunami, which to English speakers is both seemingly unpronounceable and conveys no meaningful description in English.
Right, the introduction of the unpronounceable tsunami into English unnecessarily increased the entropy of the language a notch further. Why, for what purpose? Seems to me the only plausible reason is more because of erudite snobbishness than out of any practical utilitarian reason.
That said, I'm not opposed to English stealing words from foreign languages when it makes sense, for example the German zeitgeist is a wonderful expressive replacement for the spirit of the times, similarly translating say gedankenexperiment is straightforward but we don't do so as the word has a rich contextual meaning for physicists both in English and other languages. Thus, it's best left as is.
Back to tsunami. Whenever I hear the word mispronounced by those who ought to know better it just grates badly, the mangled mispronunciation distracts my attention from what's actually being said. So often one hears TV newsreaders including those on the BBC slur the word as 'sooonami' when clearly its English spelling indicates the correct pronunciation. Tsu, つ, sounds like a hissing snake—say it to yourself. Is that not obvious?
Fashion should not be the reason for stealing foreign words but rather because it makes sense to do so. Moreover, we should be respectful of the languages from whence these words came. Perhaps the adoption of the Hepburn spellings is a Japanese hint suggesting that we try a little harder.
> English has a long tradition of stealing words from other languages then mangling them almost beyond recognition because we're too lazy to take efforts to pronounce them correctly. To me, this is a form of language arrogance.
Other languages do the same to English words. Lots of words have been borrowed and borrowed again across multiple languages changing pronunciation each time.
> Why, for what purpose? Seems to me the only plausible reason is more because of erudite snobbishness than out of any practical utilitarian reason.
Possibly because the term tidal wave is misleading as it has nothing to do with tides?
> for example the German zeitgeist
That is a great word.
> So often one hears TV newsreaders including those on the BBC
The BBC used to be very good at this a long time ago now. I believe they got rid of the unit that provided the guidance on the pronunciation of foreign words.
> we're too lazy to take efforts to pronounce them correctly
On that part: as anecdotal as it is, as a lifelong native Japanese speaker myself, I can't pronounce random 日本語 appearing in the middle of English sentence without ceasing speech and partially "rebooting" my brain in the Japanese mode. And therefore, I don't really take an American or whoever non-native saying Japanese sooonahrmeey as particularly disrespectful or upsetting.
Some people get really upset when I'd say different languages implement thought processes, speech recognition, and speech pronunciation processes differently - but that's what languages are. So it's what it is.
As for use of tsunami over tidal waves, I'd agree that the latter is perfectly fine. Sprinkling tsunamis everywhere in media do feel a bit too clickbaity.
Thank for your comment. I understand the difficulty Japanese speakers have in saying some phonemes in English and that's natural because of fundamental differences in the languages.
When listening to a Japanese (or any nonnative speaker) speaking in English I'm particularly tolerant because of my own difficulty speaking in a foreign language, I have difficulty with French pronunciation for example.
What I'm riled up about here is that English speakers can easily pronounce Tsu just by saying the letters as they are written. Yes, in English speaking letters t, s and u in sequence is uncommon but perfectly doable, one only has to be mindful and most people are not. Sure, English speakers do have legitimate difficulty in pronouncing certain phonemes and structures in some foreign languages (glides in Chinese for instance) but the Japanese Tsu is not one of them.
There's much that can be said about why English speakers pay little attention to many aspects of their own language but in short I'd put much of it down to it being the common lingua franca and bad to almost appalling language education in much of the anglophone world.
It would be nice if English speakers weren't so cocky about their language and realized that most of the world speaks different languages other than their own.
It's an interesting choice to suggest that the switch to Hepburn romanisation was motivated for a desire to better help English speakers pronounce Japanese words when tsunami is your example. The official Kunrei-shiki romanisation for つなみ is 'tunami', and I can promise you that nobody who visits Japan tells their friends and family that they visited Mount Huzi (ふじ). You would have a point if you had chosen something like Mitutoyo, but even then names are usually the exception when it comes to romanisation/anglicisation as official rules are less applicable, cf. Mitsubishi.
Still, something like 'sooonami' is particularly grating even if we ignore the pretentious BBC accent (I have heard tsu-na-mi on BBC shows to be fair). It could be because as you said the onset gets simplified to better fit English phonotactics like with other words: (ph)thalic acid, (p)terodactyl, kr(w)asan (croissant) in American English with a doubly 'wrong' t at the end, (k)nife, (g)nome, sometimes (g)nu, etc, but I don't think this is it. Su-na-mi sounds fine and this is how it's pronounced in Spanish and some other languages too, every language ends up 'mispronouncing' words if it doesn't fit nicely into the existing phonology. I think what bothers me the most about 'sooonami' is the stress inevitably gets placed on the second syllable which becomes 'nah' in non-rhotic accents which just sounds wrong, and in terms of Japanese phonology it's rare to place the stress on the middle syllable, never mind that the mora is wrong and the pitch accent is wrong, but I by no means speak Japanese.
As for why English even uses tsunami in the first place, maybe 'tidal wave' makes sense if that's what you grew up with or you live in a part of the world at risk of tsunamis, but I don't think I made the connection until I was an adult. Are all tides not waves? Tidal bore, tidal flood, storm wave, etc, sure, unusual events relating to the tide or weather, tidal wave fits if we ignore that they're not caused by the tide, but it doesn't seem comparable to me even if tidal wave isn't wrong and is synonymous.
I selected tsunami because of its very common usage and rapid rise in English (I'm old enough to watch it happen), and that most English speakers pronounce it differently to its accepted English spelling.
I've actually discussed the pronunciation with native Japanese speakers and several have told me that the correct pronunciation is somewhere between tsu and tu, the tsu is too hard and the tu too soft. That's another debate for linguists and language experts which I am not.
My post and follow-up reply are principally aimed at English and English speakers and language training in anglophone countries. As I mentioned, pronunciation matters because for many people upon hearing a word mispronounced it takes additional time to mentally process it which distracts from what is being said.
The real issue here is not whether that some linguist translated the word with tsu or tu but rather that once the romanisation was agreed upon then there ought to be an agreed pronunciation based on that spelling. That's principally my point.
No doubt tsu is uncommon in other English spellings but the usage of the word tsunami is very common so it ought to be incumbent on public speakers to pronounce it correctly. I believe this comes down to poor language training. Why training matters can be inferred from my other imported word zeitgeist, pronouncing it is never a problem because English is a Germanic language, thus it has common roots with German. Again I'd stress I'm not a linguist and my objection is purely practical, I find bad pronouncation very distracting.
I think your use of (ph)thalic acid, (p)terodactyl, etc. is stretching it a bit. These scientific and technical words are not as in as common useage (on the say the daily news) as tsunami is but I concede their usage is growing. It's unfair to criticize people who cannot pronounce strange and or uncommon words at least without some practice. I spent years studying organic chemistry and I still have difficulty in pronouncing some of the rarer functional groups. Take a look at the official IUPAC list of chemical names, I defy most experienced chemists to pronounce many of those names upon first sight.
Re your point about the strangeness of English spelling and pronunciation, (k)nife, (g)nome, etc., that's a whole new subject which I've not time to discuss here execpt to say if you don't already watch the YouTube channels Robwords and Words Unravelled then you ought to do so. Anyone interested in words and language would find them most interesting.
Edit: I forgot to mention the meaning of the expression 'tital wave' was taught to us at a very eary age and it had the same meaning and connotation as tsunami. We learned about tidal waves in social studies in primary school. I'm surprised this was even raised as knowledge about the term across the population was so well known that querying it would have been considered strange. It seems tsunami has done more damage to our language that I'd have thought.
> English has a long tradition of stealing words from other languages then mangling them almost beyond recognition because we're too lazy to take efforts to pronounce them correctly. To me, this is a form of language arrogance.
First, there is more than one English: British (plus England, Scotland, etc), American, Australian, Indian, etc.
Second, each language has its own way of doing things, and so words would be pronounced according to the rules of the context of the language that is being used. Should the Japanese pronounce "tempura" the way the Portuguese do, given that the Japanese got the idea from them? Or should a Japanese speaker pronounce it "properly" for the Japanese, and a Portuguese speaker properly for that language?
> So often one hears TV newsreaders including those on the BBC slur the word as 'sooonami' when clearly its English spelling indicates the correct pronunciation. Tsu, つ, sounds like a hissing snake—say it to yourself. Is that not obvious?
Welcome to the world of accents.
Also worth considering that the fact that English does not really care about accents (or tones) to convey meaning helps non-native speakers use it. Two ESL people can probably communicate well enough to get messages across. (Probably handy for English being the modern lingua franca.)
Transcription gets even messier when more than two languages are involved. Russian uses the Polianov system as a "cyrillization" method. It's neither Hepburn nor Kunrei-shiki, which can be confusing if you are a Russian Language learner and know Japanese or English.
Some Japanese words entered Russian not directly, but through English. In these cases, the word is first romanized using Hepburn, and then adapted to Russian using English-to-Russian rules. A classic example is 寿司, which Polianov would render as суси (susi), but Russians mostly know as суши (sushi). Then there are words which actually do faithfully follow Polianov, as in 新宿, which is written as Синдзуку (Sindzuku) instead of Шинджуку (Shinjuku).
The current Romaji system is pretty decent, unlike Pinyin or the Korean transliteration system... Or Arabic romanisation which seems to be all over the place. (Yes, I know Arabic is an abjad.)
47 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadThe chart halfway down this blog post lays out some of the challenges once the hanyu pinyin standard was instituted in 2009:
https://frozengarlic.wordpress.com/on-romanization/
The author concludes with this observation:
So that’s why people in Taiwan can’t spell anything consistently and why all the English-language newspapers spell the same things differently. As for me, I’m giving up on trying to remember how everyone spells their name. I know lots of people, especially Taiwan nationalists, dislike having the PRC hanyu pinyin system. I dislike imposing it upon them. However, in only three weeks, I’ve found myself spelling the same thing in multiple ways and wasting time looking up how I did it last time. Since almost no one reads my blog anyway, I’ll do it the way that’s most convenient for me.
I’ll also always provide the Chinese characters so that people who can read them know who I’m talking about.
It's unfortunate but I don't think it'll get fixed any time soon. Nobody wants to be called Mr. I, O, U, An, or No. (The most common romanization for these family names would be: Lee, Oh, Woo, Ahn, and Roh.)
> The council’s recommendation also adopts Hepburn spellings for し, じ and つ as shi, ji, and tsu, compared to the Kunrei spellings of si, zi and tu.
I could imagine si, zi and tu sound closer to the spoken sounds to Mandarin speakers.
That's the thing... to some other non-English language speakers, the existing/old romanization method actually is more accurate regarding how the letters would be pronounced to them, especially coming from languages that don't have the same e.g. [ch] or [ts] sounds as written with Hepburn.
The one technical downside I would say to this change is, 1:1 machine transliteration is no longer possible with Hepburn.
xi → hsi ji → chi ci → tz'u
If you look at the kana, the Japanese syllabic writing system, they have this ordering: ka ki ku ke ko, sa shi su se so, ta chi tsu te to, etc. If you follow the regularity where there should be a "ti" sound there is no "ti" sound and it happens to be pronounced "chi".
One common analysis holds that the underlying phonemes really are: ta ti tu te to. Traditional Japanese grammarians usually analyzed it this way. And they were historically pronounced that way: it has arisen out of relatively recent sound change. Somewhat like how some British speakers pronounce "Tuesday" such that it sounds much like "Chews-day" to speakers of other dialects. Affrication in a fixed context. The t phoneme triggers that kind of affrication obligatorily in Japanese, before the i vowel or y glide.
Some disagree with this as overly theoretic and based excessively on historical linguistics, and they insist that sh and f and ch are distinct phonemes in Japanese. But the Japanese writing system itself treats it as if they were not.
If you are learning Japanese it makes sense to pick a system that reflects the internal logic of kana spelling. If you want to just approximately pronounce Japanese words in English then you want something that reflects the logic of English spelling.
These two goals are always in tension. Mandarin pinyin, for example, was designed to reflect the logic of Mandarin phonology in a consistent way. It's not meant to be easily pronounceable by English speakers. It's to enable Mandarin speakers to look up words in a dictionary or for students of the language to study Mandarin. Though it has ended up used as a pronunciation guide for English speakers. And that often doesn't go well; a lot of English speakers don't know what to do with the q's and x's.
Edit: actually the only one I ever had an issue with was one of my homestay's names "Ryouhei"...that Ryou sound...it's like the Y stops me from rolling the R properly, so odd.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39624972
English-friendly Romanization system proposed for Japanese language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42606969 - Jan 2025 (23 comments)
Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39624972 - March 2024 (97 comments)
This is going to make finding specific Japanese game roms even more annoying.
The ō in Hepburn could correspond to おう or おお or オー. That's an ambiguity.
Where does Hepburn disambiguate?
In Japanese, an E column kana followed by I sometimes makes a long E, like in 先生 (sen + sei -> sensē). The "SEI" is one unit. But in other situations it does not, like in a compound word ending in the E kana, where the second word starts with I. For instance 酒色 (sake + iro -> sakeiro, not sakēro).
Hepburn distinguishes these; the hiragana spelling does not!
This is one of the issues that makes it very hard to read Japanese that is written with hiragana only, rather than kanji. No word breaks and not knowing whether せい is supposed to be sē or sei.
There are curiosities like karaage which is "kara" (crust) + "age" (fried thing). A lot of the time it is pronounced as karāge, because of the way RA and A come together. Other times you hear a kind of flutter in it which articulates two A's.
I have no idea which romanization to use. Flip a coin?
To me, Hepburn’s strength relative to the old government romanization is that it increases the likelihood that an English speaker will make approximately the right sound when reading some Romaji, and that people seem to prefer it in general.
For people not interested in learning Japanese, however, a unified romanization could have its benefits. It just never struck me as particularly inconsistent to begin with, even after so many years living there.
[edit]
Wikipedia suggests it might be from Wāpuro rōmaji, where "u" is always used to spell the kana "う"
The kana are usually written in a table where each row is a vowel and each column is a consonant, like on Wikipedia[1]. Most columns of the table have five characters, each representing the same consonant combined with one of the vowels. For example: か/き/く/け/こ ka/ki/ku/ke/ko, ま/み/む/め/も ma/mi/mu/me/mo. Some columns have "missing" sounds (や/ゆ/よ ya/yu/yo); but what's important for our purposes is that some columns have irregular sounds: さ/し/す/せ/そ sa/shi/su/se/so and た/ち/つ/て/と ta/chi/tsu/te/to. There are no si, ti, or tu sounds in standard Japanese; they have shi, chi, and tsu instead.
Using diacritic markings gets you more consonants. Most of these are made by adding a couple tick marks to the corner of the character, which makes the consonant voiced instead of unvoiced. For example: か ka -> が ga, と to -> ど do, ひ hi -> び bi. But the irregular sounds stay irregular: し shi -> じ ji instead of zi, ち chi -> ぢ ji (again) instead of di, and つ tsu -> づ zu instead of du. (す su -> ず zu gives the same sound but in a regular way.)
You can also combine i-vowel characters with y-consonant characters to get sounds with consonant clusters: き ki + や ya = きゃ kya, み mi + よ yo = みょ myo, etc. The irregular sounds remain irregular: し shi + ゆ yu = しゅ shu (instead of syu), ち chi + や ya = ちゃ cha (instead of tya), じ ji + よ yo = じょ jo (instead of zyo). There's a Reddit post with a nice table showing all the available sounds[2].
Now the problem for romanization is this: Should the romanization reflect the irregular sounds in the spoken language? Or should it reflect the regular groupings of the kana characters? づ and ず might both be pronounced "zu", but they come from different linguistic origins, just as "bear" and "bare" do in English. The Hepburn system uses spellings that match the sounds, while the current standard (Kunrei-shiki) uses spellings that match the kana grouping: し si (instead of shi), ち ti (instead of chi), じ zi (instead of ji), つ tu (instead of tsu), じょ syo (instead of sho), etc.
The Hepburn system tells you how to pronounce the word[3] at the cost of being a lossy encoding. For anyone familiar with the Latin alphabet, that's almost always the better choice, and it's nearly universal in the Western world. Kunrei-shiki does better reflect the underlying structure of the Japanese language and its native writing system, which is probably why the Japanese government preferred it. But anyone who wants to learn the language is going to learn the kana almost immediately (it's just a few hours with flash cards), so IMHO that's pretty small advantage.
I deliberately didn't talk about long vowels, glottal stops, the differences between hiragana and katakana, different pronunciations of ん (n), or how to handle ん (n) followed by a vowel, but if you're curious about Japanese romanization those topics may also be of interest to you. I can try to explain more if anyone's curious.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kana_chart_1.png [2] shevy-java ↗ "The council’s recommendation also adopts Hepburn spellings for し, じ and つ as shi, ji, and tsu, compared to the Kunrei spellings of si, zi and tu." belviewreview ↗ About a decade ago, I became a fan of the remarkable Japanese child prodigy drummer Kanade Sato. That lead to me to learn the surprising fact that Japan has 4 writing systems: kanji, hiragana, katakana, and romanji. flumpcakes ↗ Impressive drumming skills! donatj ↗ Is been 25 years since I took Japanese in highschool but I'm relatively certain that our textbooks had ち romanized as tchi which from my recollection seems more accurate to its actual common pronunciation. SV_BubbleTime ↗ crackles knuckles hilbert42 ↗ "The council’s recommendation also adopts Hepburn spellings for し, じ and つ as shi, ji, and tsu, compared to the Kunrei spellings of si, zi and tu." graemep ↗ > English has a long tradition of stealing words from other languages then mangling them almost beyond recognition because we're too lazy to take efforts to pronounce them correctly. To me, this is a form of language arrogance. numpad0 ↗ > we're too lazy to take efforts to pronounce them correctly hilbert42 ↗ Thank for your comment. I understand the difficulty Japanese speakers have in saying some phonemes in English and that's natural because of fundamental differences in the languages. MalikTerm ↗ It's an interesting choice to suggest that the switch to Hepburn romanisation was motivated for a desire to better help English speakers pronounce Japanese words when tsunami is your example. The official Kunrei-shiki romanisation for つなみ is 'tunami', and I can promise you that nobody who visits Japan tells their friends and family that they visited Mount Huzi (ふじ). You would have a point if you had chosen something like Mitutoyo, but even then names are usually the exception when it comes to romanisation/anglicisation as official rules are less applicable, cf. Mitsubishi. hilbert42 ↗ "Kunrei-shiki romanisation for つなみ is 'tunami' " throw0101a ↗ > English has a long tradition of stealing words from other languages then mangling them almost beyond recognition because we're too lazy to take efforts to pronounce them correctly. To me, this is a form of language arrogance. apflkx ↗ Transcription gets even messier when more than two languages are involved. Russian uses the Polianov system as a "cyrillization" method. It's neither Hepburn nor Kunrei-shiki, which can be confusing if you are a Russian Language learner and know Japanese or English. nephihaha ↗ The current Romaji system is pretty decent, unlike Pinyin or the Korean transliteration system... Or Arabic romanisation which seems to be all over the place. (Yes, I know Arabic is an abjad.) dhruv3006 ↗ I read romantic rules. elif ↗ Awesome. Learning Japanese as an English speaker was already ridiculously overcomplicated. So pumped to do it all over again.
Is that an anti-China thing? Or is it a simplification thing?
I don't fully understand the underlying motivation.
Here's the video that got me interested in Sato www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYpFL08m5fQ&list=RDXYpFL08m5fQ&start_radio=1
I have Real Real Japan on my YouTube algorithm. So, I’m a bit of an expert on this topic…
As a Westerner I know very little Japanese but having worked in Japan for a short while I take an interest in the language.
When reading this it occurred to me there might have been more reason for adopting the Hepburn spelling than stated. As as English speaker I've noticed how poorly we pronounce Japanese words and perhaps this change is also intended as a subtle way of letting us know.
English has a long tradition of stealing words from other languages then mangling them almost beyond recognition because we're too lazy to take efforts to pronounce them correctly. To me, this is a form of language arrogance.
Foe example, I've long complained about the adoption in recent decades of the word tsunami into English and then mangling its pronunciation beyond recognition.
I'm old enough to remember when 'tidal wave' was the generally accepted wording for that ocean phenomenon—now we've replaced these perfectly understandable and descriptive English words with tsunami, which to English speakers is both seemingly unpronounceable and conveys no meaningful description in English.
Right, the introduction of the unpronounceable tsunami into English unnecessarily increased the entropy of the language a notch further. Why, for what purpose? Seems to me the only plausible reason is more because of erudite snobbishness than out of any practical utilitarian reason.
That said, I'm not opposed to English stealing words from foreign languages when it makes sense, for example the German zeitgeist is a wonderful expressive replacement for the spirit of the times, similarly translating say gedankenexperiment is straightforward but we don't do so as the word has a rich contextual meaning for physicists both in English and other languages. Thus, it's best left as is.
Back to tsunami. Whenever I hear the word mispronounced by those who ought to know better it just grates badly, the mangled mispronunciation distracts my attention from what's actually being said. So often one hears TV newsreaders including those on the BBC slur the word as 'sooonami' when clearly its English spelling indicates the correct pronunciation. Tsu, つ, sounds like a hissing snake—say it to yourself. Is that not obvious?
Fashion should not be the reason for stealing foreign words but rather because it makes sense to do so. Moreover, we should be respectful of the languages from whence these words came. Perhaps the adoption of the Hepburn spellings is a Japanese hint suggesting that we try a little harder.
Other languages do the same to English words. Lots of words have been borrowed and borrowed again across multiple languages changing pronunciation each time.
> Why, for what purpose? Seems to me the only plausible reason is more because of erudite snobbishness than out of any practical utilitarian reason.
Possibly because the term tidal wave is misleading as it has nothing to do with tides?
> for example the German zeitgeist
That is a great word.
> So often one hears TV newsreaders including those on the BBC
The BBC used to be very good at this a long time ago now. I believe they got rid of the unit that provided the guidance on the pronunciation of foreign words.
On that part: as anecdotal as it is, as a lifelong native Japanese speaker myself, I can't pronounce random 日本語 appearing in the middle of English sentence without ceasing speech and partially "rebooting" my brain in the Japanese mode. And therefore, I don't really take an American or whoever non-native saying Japanese sooonahrmeey as particularly disrespectful or upsetting.
Some people get really upset when I'd say different languages implement thought processes, speech recognition, and speech pronunciation processes differently - but that's what languages are. So it's what it is.
As for use of tsunami over tidal waves, I'd agree that the latter is perfectly fine. Sprinkling tsunamis everywhere in media do feel a bit too clickbaity.
When listening to a Japanese (or any nonnative speaker) speaking in English I'm particularly tolerant because of my own difficulty speaking in a foreign language, I have difficulty with French pronunciation for example.
What I'm riled up about here is that English speakers can easily pronounce Tsu just by saying the letters as they are written. Yes, in English speaking letters t, s and u in sequence is uncommon but perfectly doable, one only has to be mindful and most people are not. Sure, English speakers do have legitimate difficulty in pronouncing certain phonemes and structures in some foreign languages (glides in Chinese for instance) but the Japanese Tsu is not one of them.
There's much that can be said about why English speakers pay little attention to many aspects of their own language but in short I'd put much of it down to it being the common lingua franca and bad to almost appalling language education in much of the anglophone world.
It would be nice if English speakers weren't so cocky about their language and realized that most of the world speaks different languages other than their own.
Still, something like 'sooonami' is particularly grating even if we ignore the pretentious BBC accent (I have heard tsu-na-mi on BBC shows to be fair). It could be because as you said the onset gets simplified to better fit English phonotactics like with other words: (ph)thalic acid, (p)terodactyl, kr(w)asan (croissant) in American English with a doubly 'wrong' t at the end, (k)nife, (g)nome, sometimes (g)nu, etc, but I don't think this is it. Su-na-mi sounds fine and this is how it's pronounced in Spanish and some other languages too, every language ends up 'mispronouncing' words if it doesn't fit nicely into the existing phonology. I think what bothers me the most about 'sooonami' is the stress inevitably gets placed on the second syllable which becomes 'nah' in non-rhotic accents which just sounds wrong, and in terms of Japanese phonology it's rare to place the stress on the middle syllable, never mind that the mora is wrong and the pitch accent is wrong, but I by no means speak Japanese.
As for why English even uses tsunami in the first place, maybe 'tidal wave' makes sense if that's what you grew up with or you live in a part of the world at risk of tsunamis, but I don't think I made the connection until I was an adult. Are all tides not waves? Tidal bore, tidal flood, storm wave, etc, sure, unusual events relating to the tide or weather, tidal wave fits if we ignore that they're not caused by the tide, but it doesn't seem comparable to me even if tidal wave isn't wrong and is synonymous.
I selected tsunami because of its very common usage and rapid rise in English (I'm old enough to watch it happen), and that most English speakers pronounce it differently to its accepted English spelling.
I've actually discussed the pronunciation with native Japanese speakers and several have told me that the correct pronunciation is somewhere between tsu and tu, the tsu is too hard and the tu too soft. That's another debate for linguists and language experts which I am not.
My post and follow-up reply are principally aimed at English and English speakers and language training in anglophone countries. As I mentioned, pronunciation matters because for many people upon hearing a word mispronounced it takes additional time to mentally process it which distracts from what is being said.
The real issue here is not whether that some linguist translated the word with tsu or tu but rather that once the romanisation was agreed upon then there ought to be an agreed pronunciation based on that spelling. That's principally my point.
No doubt tsu is uncommon in other English spellings but the usage of the word tsunami is very common so it ought to be incumbent on public speakers to pronounce it correctly. I believe this comes down to poor language training. Why training matters can be inferred from my other imported word zeitgeist, pronouncing it is never a problem because English is a Germanic language, thus it has common roots with German. Again I'd stress I'm not a linguist and my objection is purely practical, I find bad pronouncation very distracting.
I think your use of (ph)thalic acid, (p)terodactyl, etc. is stretching it a bit. These scientific and technical words are not as in as common useage (on the say the daily news) as tsunami is but I concede their usage is growing. It's unfair to criticize people who cannot pronounce strange and or uncommon words at least without some practice. I spent years studying organic chemistry and I still have difficulty in pronouncing some of the rarer functional groups. Take a look at the official IUPAC list of chemical names, I defy most experienced chemists to pronounce many of those names upon first sight.
Re your point about the strangeness of English spelling and pronunciation, (k)nife, (g)nome, etc., that's a whole new subject which I've not time to discuss here execpt to say if you don't already watch the YouTube channels Robwords and Words Unravelled then you ought to do so. Anyone interested in words and language would find them most interesting.
Edit: I forgot to mention the meaning of the expression 'tital wave' was taught to us at a very eary age and it had the same meaning and connotation as tsunami. We learned about tidal waves in social studies in primary school. I'm surprised this was even raised as knowledge about the term across the population was so well known that querying it would have been considered strange. It seems tsunami has done more damage to our language that I'd have thought.
First, there is more than one English: British (plus England, Scotland, etc), American, Australian, Indian, etc.
Second, each language has its own way of doing things, and so words would be pronounced according to the rules of the context of the language that is being used. Should the Japanese pronounce "tempura" the way the Portuguese do, given that the Japanese got the idea from them? Or should a Japanese speaker pronounce it "properly" for the Japanese, and a Portuguese speaker properly for that language?
> So often one hears TV newsreaders including those on the BBC slur the word as 'sooonami' when clearly its English spelling indicates the correct pronunciation. Tsu, つ, sounds like a hissing snake—say it to yourself. Is that not obvious?
Welcome to the world of accents.
Also worth considering that the fact that English does not really care about accents (or tones) to convey meaning helps non-native speakers use it. Two ESL people can probably communicate well enough to get messages across. (Probably handy for English being the modern lingua franca.)
Some Japanese words entered Russian not directly, but through English. In these cases, the word is first romanized using Hepburn, and then adapted to Russian using English-to-Russian rules. A classic example is 寿司, which Polianov would render as суси (susi), but Russians mostly know as суши (sushi). Then there are words which actually do faithfully follow Polianov, as in 新宿, which is written as Синдзуку (Sindzuku) instead of Шинджуку (Shinjuku).