Talk:Romanization of Japanese/Archive 1

message: hmm. I thought it was Romanji -Sv
:Nope. It appears to be a fairly common misspelling, though. --Brion 00:49 Oct 19, 2002 (UTC)
:Corrected. -- Bugbread  12:12 Jan 17, 2004 (JST)
The long vowel mark cannot be displayed under windows' Japanese encoding. user:Ktsquare
:Hmm, I'm running (US) Windows 2000; it comes up fine in Mozilla 1.2beta and Internet Explorer 5.5. What are you running? --Brion
::It looks fine now. Kt2
: I've very frequently seen rōmaji referred to in English; I've virtually never seen it misspelled "romanji". I am therefore changing the text accordingly. -- Hoary 08:32, 2005 Mar 13 (UTC)
It might be worth adding a note on this particular misspelling somewhere in the article, as it is very common.  I've just come from Hiragana where an anonymous editor actually "corrected" romaji to romanji.  It would be nice to have an explanation to point such people to. — Haeleth Talk 14:22, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: "Romanji"

message: Although this doesn't need to be done right away, I think this eventually needs to be split into two articles:
*Romaji, dealing with the use of the Latin alphabet in the Japanese written language
*Japanese romanization, dealing with the transliteration of Japanese into English
Most rômaji encountered by native Japanese people isn't transliterated; it appears in text alongside kanji and kana. Things like "OL" and "H suru" and "W hai" and "Y sha" and so on. A completely different subject matter than transliterating text for foreigners, and it doesn't generally involve the Hepburn/kunrei debate at all.
At any rate, people wanting to know how Japanese is romanized will probably not know the word rômaji. - Sekicho 14:42, Nov 1, 2004 (UTC)
:There is an article Transcribing_English_to_Japanese, which you may or may not be aware of. I think we should have an article like Japanese writing system, similar to Chinese writing system. As you notice, English alphabets are intergred parts of Japanese writing system. It seems to make sense to have one central article overviewing the writing system and if the topic grows too much, separate it. -- Taku 17:09, Nov 1, 2004 (UTC)
:I agree... the writing of English in Japanese (Namely the Alphabet letters) doesn't have anything to do with romanization. I wonder how that ever made it on this page o_O -- SuperMidget 15:48, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Splitting the article 

message: Through the discussion of the Modern systems of transliteration Nippon-Siki is listed as a main form. However in the Kunrei-shiki section this is then spelt Nihon-Shiki. Which is correct, also should it be Shiki or Siki? This really should be standardised throughout this text as it's quite confusing, however I don't know which is correct so cannot change it. Ben W Bell 15:22, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Both: Nihon-shiki is correct in Hepburn, but Nippon-siki is correct in 日本式 itself.  But Wikipedia prefers Hepburn, so Nihon-shiki it is. Jpatokal 17:05, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Cheers. It doesn't really matter that much which one, but this article should only have one spelling in it, the nuances of the differences can be left in the Nihon-shiki article itself. Ben W Bell 20:03, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Modern Systems Consistent Spelling 

message: Now that the article title has been renamed from Romaji to Rōmaji, let's retrospectively discuss if this was a good idea. Over at Everything2.com, I remember it was possible to have titles with Unicode characters by using character entity references, however the general policy did not approve of this. I checked the manual of style for Japanese articles and
it says article titles "must use short vowels" and that apostrophes are too confusing. One thing to note is that circumflexes were possible to use in article titles even before the switch to UTF-8 encoding, but weren't used. However macrons are more popular and now any Unicode character including letters with macrons can be  technically used. I don't understand how avoiding apostrophe can actually reduce confusion instead of increasing it, but oh well, that's the policy. —Tokek 17:13, 13 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article title: Romaji or Rōmaji? 

message: I think it might be worthwhile to mention common mis-uses of romanization, commonly used by foreigners and Japanese alike.
While obviously people are standing by the ti, tu, si, and hu romanizations, others are pretty much universally shunned. (I hope.)
For example:
* sya/syu/syo instead of sha/shu/sho or even shya/shya/shyo
* ah instead of ā/â/u (this point is debatable I guess)
* uh instead of ū/û/u (rare, but understandable given the above and 'oh')
And even quite oddly (by non English speakers) you can often see long vowel sounds with 'assumed' consonants for example:
* バーガー (burger) romanized as berger/burgur (proper style would produce bāgā or baagaa)
* スロープ (slope) romanized as slorp
* コート (coat, or coart) romanized as coult/coalt
and many more examples. While these are not strictly romanizations (more like attempts at spelling English by non-native speakers) it may be useful to note some incorrect uses to clear up some confusion that people feel when trying to understand signs that are supposedly readable by English speakers or by people able to read English characters. Gavin 2005 07 15
:sya/syu/syo: those are used in Kunrei-shiki & Nihon-shiki romanizations which are not non-standard. Spelling coat as coart, etc. seem to be just English spelling mistakes. I don't think listing incorrect permutations is appropriate for an encyclopedia. The Engrish article already makes fun of English spelling mistakes by Japanese people, I don't see why we need yet another. —Tokek 16:44, 15 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Addition to Non-standard romanization

message: Why were all references to JSL removed from this page. It may not be in common usage, but I don't think that we need only discuss common romaji systems here. If it's significant enough to warrant its own article, it certainly needs at the very least a passing mention in the article on romaji. Nohat 23:10, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: JSL

message: I would appreciate seeing a good article on the factual basis (if any) for the often cited claim that romaji impairs one's learning of Japanese. Are there any empirical studies that have looked into this? Any studies that have actualy compared classes of students whose method of instruction differs only in the use of romaji versus kana? What lead to the widespread change from romaji-based texts to kana-based texts? Was it just intellectual fashion, was it based on empirical findings, was it driven by marketing of texts as being written in "real Japanese"? Does anyone know?
:I've always thought this claim was unlikely to be based on real evidence. The series of books I used, Japanese for Busy People, had kana from the beginning, but it is hard to understand (a) how anyone could measure the difference (b) why romaji could possibly make such a difference, since kana do not actually have any pronunciation information in them. Generally speaking, language learning (not just Japanese) is notorious for having fashionable "wonder" methodologies claimed to affect students, but for which it is extremely hard to measure real differences. English language learning has probably hundreds of them, and they change like fashions. There is no real scientific basis for any of them. The biggest differences in speed of learning certainly aren't caused by using romaji or kana, etc., but by factors such as student motivation. Any claim that romaji actually affects foreign students negatively is probably nothing more than someone's opinion. --DannyWilde 05:05, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Romaji and Language learning 

message: Kunrei and Nihonshiki use circumflexes, not macrons. Take a look at the link to romaji soudan shitsu, which has details from the standards documents. In fact I think they used macrons for Nihon shiki then switched over to circumflexes. Anyway the standard says circumflexes. --DannyWilde 07:35, 11 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Circumflex on Nihon, Kunrei

message: This article claims that long vowels in Modified Hepburn are represented with vowels with macrons. However, according to the definition in the Hepburn romanization article, it's actually Revised Hepburn that does this, whereas Modified uses the doubled-vowel notation. That article says that "Revised Hepburn may be referred to as modified Hepburn" (and vice versa) but I think things should be uniform for clarity's sake. Thus, should we change the references in this article to "Modified Hepburn" to read "Revised Hepburn" instead? -- J44xm 23:52, 14 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: You seem to have checked it carefully so I suggest that you go ahead and change it as above. --DannyWilde 05:07, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: The page's Modified Hepburn isn't such?

message: For example, there is no accepted way of romanizing the common combination 'ウィ' of katakana u and small i, used in such words as ウィークリーマンション (literally, "weekly mansion", i.e. an apartment rented by the week). The romanization systems are sometimes informally extended, so that for example ウィ is sometimes romanized as "wi".
Can I get a sanity check on this? I tried searching Google and found exactly one case of "ウィークリー" being romanized with "wi": . Also, usually, wouldn't this be romanized as "uiikurii"? Anyway, the "tu" example is OK - I didn't see any rationale for changing it, it's probably the clearest example of any, since the "フィ" etc. ones get changed to "fi". Any comments appreciated. --DannyWilde 12:31, 18 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Quick check on this one

message: moved from Talk:Romaji – ABCDe✉ 00:46, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  add kanji and English to all examples 

message: Wouldn't エン be a better romanization of the letter "N"? (originally unsigned by Louisng114, 2006-04-05 16:12:41 EST
: I agree that it would, but I think エヌ/enu is the official transliteration. ん/ン didn't exist when kana was created, and the Japanese probably transliterated the English alphabet and the letter N before ん/ン was created. So, they just kept it as「エヌ」。
: - KevinJr42 09:22-25, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
:: There's an "official" transliteration? (And I'm pretty sure ん has been around for a good bit longer than English has been known in Japan.) More likely it's due to the fact that if N were エン, acronyms like NBC エンビーシー would sound like MBC instead. Regardless, I've fixed the spelling of NHK. --Aponar Kestrel (talk) 23:20, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  (And then promptly bungled it again, when adding the citation. Thank you, Kusunose.) --Aponar Kestrel (talk) 07:26, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Uh, yeah... Kana is definitely older than the knowledge of English in Japan. I think n is the only kana without an inherent vowel sound, mainly because there were so many Chinese loanwords ending in -n. 惑乱 分からん 09:43, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Romanization of "N"