> 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.

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.

The popularity of Hepburn has a lot more to do with the English language than the Japanese language

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?

Hepburn also allows the use of the double vowel, in this case: kooen

It's terrible that Windows still has nothing good for this built-in. I use https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/quick-ac... which is at least first-party. It's still got a few bugs, but it's a big improvement.

(The bugs I've experienced: it doesn't properly disable itself during video games, despite claiming to do so; sometimes the popup seem to come up when I swear I didn't press the shortcut keys; rarely, the popup gets stuck on screen and needs to be Alt+F4'ed.)

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:

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.

Impressive drumming skills!

> 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.

Because 少年 in hiragana is しょうねん: spelled out that is "sho u ne n"

Many, but not all long vowels in japanese follow these:

ああ a i -> as in おかあさん, mother

いい i i -> as in ちいさい, small

うう u u -> as in すう, to smoke

えい e i -> as in せんせい, a teacher

おう o u -> as in こうえん, a park

Yes, exceptions to this exist (like おお) and some are actually dipthongs and not actually long-vowels, but easier to think of them like that.

Wikipedia is right; the romanization is just matching how it's rendered in kana.

> 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.)

Look at the standard kana table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goj%C5%ABon

> 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.

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.

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 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.

Not closer to the spoken sounds, closer to English orthography.

That's one aspect I really love about macOS. I'm from a small country so nearly no one makes hardware with our exact layout, but with macOS I can always just long press to fill in the gaps. I just wish all apps used native inputs, not some weird half-baked solution they built themselves.

Use Ruby text alongside kanji, maybe?

Is that part of Hepburn? It is not mentioned in the article, nor by most explainers that I’m familiar with.

Compose o dash. Windows doesn't have an easy way to map in the compose key (usually ralt)?

big if true, jesus christ microsoft

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.

What's the best way to type Japanese on Windows? (I have a QWERTY keyboard)

On mobile I just switch to the hiragana keyboard, but that obviously isn't a sane option on desktop unless I'm clicking all the characters with a mouse?

What's interesting is that they address this problem where the latin alphabet introduces the ambiguity (Is genin げんいん or げにん? Hepburn goes with gen'in for the former to avoid ambiguity), so they could have extended that to sake'iro and applied the same strategy when the ambiguity comes from kana itself.

> There are curiosities like karaage which is "kara" (crust) + "age" (fried thing).

Slightly off-topic, but “karaage” (kara + age) isn’t “crust + frying.”

The kara comes from a country name and refers to a style of cooking — it’s a “country-name + cooking method” compound.

this is the commonly accepted explanation, though whether it’s strictly historical or a later interpretation is still debated.

If you fry something without coating it, that’s usually called “su” (plain) + “age” (frying) instead.

> In Japanese, an E column kana followed by I sometimes makes a long E, like in 先生 (sen + sei -> sensē).

While it is sometimes difficult to discern the combined E and I sound, especially for non-native speakers, the word 先生 (sensei) is technically pronounced "sensei" and should be spelled that way to distinguish it from words with long E sounds, such as ええ (ee) and お姉さん (oneesan). Similarly, the OU in 東京 (toukyou) and the OO in 大きな (ookina) are different and should be spelled differently. I hope this helps.

EDIT: Added a comma.

There’s another school of teaching, where kana and kanji are banned for the first 2-3 semesters because they are a distraction to learn and internalize words and grammar.

I’ve met a few students of this textbook system when I was on exchange and my impression was that they were very skilled at Japanese for the amount of time they’ve been a student and what they told about their seniors was they pick up kanji fast, since they already know the words.

The big problem of course is that it is completely incompatible with other schools. Where do you place them when they go on exchange? With the n3 or n5 students?

Anyway, I always thought it was interesting that the exact antithesis of RTK* exists and works.

*RTK or “remembering the kanji” is a system that teaches all kanji before student learn their first word. It’s quite popular online as it lends itself very well to solo studying.

In the first place, "romanization" of English is unstandardized! Or was that unstandardised?

Thailand, famously, was never colonized by European powers. Everywhere else, some colonial administrator standardized a system of romanization.

Minor corrections:

1. It's "Polivanov", not "Polianov".

2. It's "Синдзюку", not "Синдзуку".

Another example of JP→EN→RU is Nintendo's character Yoshi: By Polivanov, it should have become "Ёси" but since it came to RU via EN, it is written as "Йоши".

Kunrei-shiki is intended for domestic Japanese use. That's why it results in spellings that don't make logical sense for any Latin-based phonology. It's too focused on round trip unambiguity at the cost of phonetic clarity for non-Japanese. My big peeve is the company Mitutoyo using K-S, which everyone mispronounces because they don't know it's a poor transcription of "Mitsutoyo".

Yeah my impression was the Orthography is pretty consistent compared to English.

From what I understand this isn't the first time they've made some kind of change to orthography, I remember reading something about updating offical use of certain kana to reflect more modern pronunciations. It wasn't a dramatic change.

It's interesting to see some countries just have this centralised influence over something like how their language is written as they're the main ones speaking it, as opposed to English.

> 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?

It's because English has no (or very few - I can't think of any) words that begin with the same phoneme.

That's just what happens with loan words. Japanese loaned "Arbeit" (アルバイト) from German and they also pronounce it "wrong".

    The ō in Hepburn could correspond to おう or おお or オー. That's an ambiguity.

What's the issue here? They all sound exactly the same, although おお seems unusual. The choice of kana kinda depends on the what you're writing.

I don't know the details history of the system's development, however I notice that with Kunrei everything spelling is neatly 2 characters while with Hepburn it may be 2 or 3 characters:

Kunrei: ki si ti ni hi mi

Hepburn: ki shi chi ni hi mi

The politics of the issue is obviously that Hepburn is older and an American system while Nihon and Kunrei are very purposely domestic (Nihon "is much more regular than Hepburn romanization, and unlike Hepburn's system, it makes no effort to make itself easier to pronounce for English-speakers" [1]). Apparently, Hepburn was later imposed by US occupying forces in 1945.

Perhaps 80 years is long enough and suitable to effect the change officially with no loss of face.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihon-shiki

Perhaps only in the case where it's preceded by the small tsu? E.g. "一人ぼっち" -> "hitori bo[tsu]chi" -> "hitori botchi"? That's what Wikipedia says [1], although I think it's also common to (incorrectly?) use "bocchi" instead.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepburn_romanization#Long_cons...

I have seen chi and ti, both of which when qwerty typed on standard windows or mac produce ち. I have never seen it as tchi.

つ is often seen as tu or tsu.

I have been in Japan for over a decade.

“tchi” is the Hepburn romanization of っち. (Knowing very little Japanese myself, the first example that comes to mind is たまごっち → tamagotchi.)

Japan was not colonized, although it was briefly occupied.

Sri Lanka was a colony and Sinhala does not have a standard as far as I know. If there is one no one pays any attention to it.

Oh there are plenty of standards, including an official one. The problem is nobody uses them. Thai writing is weird, and between the tones and the character classes and silent letters might as well just make some shit up. My birth certificate, drivers license, and work permit all had different spellings of my name on them.

IIRC, the road signs for “Henri Dunant Road” were spelled differently on either end, which was ironic, because at least that did have a canonical Latin form.

Thanks for the correction!

しんじゅく (Cиндзюку, Sindzyuku) is an interesting case, as it has both し and じゅ in it. This is where Polivanov is similar to Kunrei. OTOH, Fukushima is cyrillized as Фукусима (Fukusima), where the ふ is a fu in Hepburn, hu in Kunrei and fu in Polivanov but し is not shi as in Hepburn, but si as in Kunrei.

Oh! That's fun to learn, given where I am from (not Japan) we all call it "Mi-chu-toy-o". A combination of misunderstanding and dialect.

>It's because English has no (or very few - I can't think of any) words that begin with the same phoneme.

Loan words, but: Tsar (zar or sar), Tswana (50/50), and Tsetse fly (usually /ts/) from the Tswana language. I don't think /ts/ ever refers to something specific in native English, it's usually plurals like it-s or from suffixes like bet-sy, gats-by, wat-son.

> What's the issue here?

You need to know previously the word to write from Hepburn to Kana when "ō" is present because data is lost in such transliteration from おう or おお or オー to Hepburn.

The internet is full of romanji written incorrectly with "o" alone when it should be "ou" or "oo" due "ō" ASCII conversion errors at one moment.

(The sooner a beginner embrace Hiragana and Katakana, the better)

The political aspect might be a big part of why and how the systems are chosen. Didn't know about that!

Native German speaker here. It fits very well here, too

It works better with other European languages' orthography too.

It's a change in purpose. Nihon-shiki was invented to teach Japanese people the Latin alphabet, with a view to replacing kana/kanji with the Latin alphabet. Therefore being understandable to someone with a good idea of the kana layout was the priority.

Hepburn was designed to teach non-Japanese people Japanese, therefore matching well to European (especially English) sounds was considered more important.

Suggesting Japanese romanise is a fringe position these days, much much more so than in the 1880s or the immediate aftermath of WW2, and making that kind of change is much easier when you have a population going from illiterate to literate than in a modern society, so nobody's seriously considered Nihon-shiki (or its slightly modernised descendent, Kunrei-shiki) a gateway to romanising Japanese for the Japanese for a long time now.

So this is sort of an official recognition that the primary purpose of romaji is for the benefit of foreigners.

How about Dogen?

https://github.com/ell1010/wincompose is like the first thing I install on any new Windows machine.

Nope. When on Windows I tend to use one of the US International or the Pseudo VT320 layout from https://keyboards.jargon-file.org/ .

Not exactly. In the Wade–Giles system:

xi → hsi ji → chi ci → tz'u

This is a good question. I have seen a wide variety over the years from native Japanese speakers. Some use the 1990s-style kana keyboard. Some use romaji input where real-time software (called an IME) automatically suggests conversion to the final Japanese word (katakana/hiragana/kanji, etc.). On a mobile phone there is usually an option to do 1990s feature phone style kana input, where the 12 key input is shown, and you press one key as many times as necessary to rotate to the correct kana that you wish to input. You can see young girls with frighteningly long fingers nails jamming away -- chatting with their friends via mobile text (Line, SMS, etc.). Their "touch memory" (and sensitivity) must be jaw-droppingly good -- like a professional drummer or something similar.

Native Cantonese speakers in Hongkong have similarly diverse input methods. I've even seen tiny digital draw pads at the public library. It is pretty exciting (to me!) to watch an elderly person furiously scribbling away on the pad, inputting traditional Chinese charaters to search something on the Internet or in the media catalog. I think it is very cool that public library makes a strong effort to empower all types of users.

    > Yeah my impression was the Orthography is pretty consistent compared to English.

As a native English speaker, I have learned this watching non-natives try to learn English spelling over the years. It is hell! I studied French in middle school and high school. I remember there being a similar level of ambiguity in their orthography (similar to English).

One weird thing that I have noticed when Japanese native speakers write emails in English: Why don't they use basic spell check? I'm talking about stuff as basic as: "teh" -> "the". Spell checkers from the early 1990s could easily correct these issues. To be clear, I rarely have an issue to understand the meaning of their emails (as a native speaker, it is very easy to skip over minor spelling and grammar mistakes), but I wonder: Why not spell check before you send?

They’re not the same. おう is discernible from おお, and the difference can be important.

That said, this is far from the most important problem in Japanese pronunciation for westerners, and at speed the distinction between them can become very subtle.

In the phonetic alphabet it's /e:/ vs. /ei/ and /o:/ vs. /ou/.

If you're an English speaker, you can be forgiven for a very stereotypical trait of the English accent. English speakers have a real hard time with the /e/ or /e:/ sounds as well as the /o/ and /o:/ sounds. Most English dialects don't have either a monophthong /e/ or /o/. Both the long and short tend to get heard as /eɪ/ and /oʊ/.

French enchanté /ɑ̃ ʃɑ̃ te/ is heard and borrowed as /ɑn.ʃɑn.teɪ/. German gehen /ge:n/ is heard as "gain" /geɪn/. And Japanese /o:/ and /ou/ both get heard as /oʊ/.

It's arguably a minimal pair in Japanese: 負う /ou/ (to carry), 王 /o:/ (king).

The main issues probably arise on official documents and stuff with financial impact.

Like how many people end up with the same romanized name while being distinct in other alphabets. Then discrepancies between the different systems because they usually are sloppy on the handling of these matters.

Now that most stuff is electronic, these small differences can have wider effects and be a PITA to fix.

Politics aside, Hepburn is better. You can’t seriously say you prefer “konniti-ha” and “susi-wo tabemasu”

I rarely miss Linux, but I liked being able to have compose keys, most of which were very logical and fast to type. Now on MacOS, I either have to know the option (alt) combination or long press, which makes my writing with accents way slower.

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

FWIW, it's HTML ruby tag, not the language.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

> I just wish all apps used native inputs, not some weird half-baked solution they built themselves.

I find this often with apps and websites, and I speak/write British English (or attempt to).

Why effort is put into making a worse interface is baffling.

The article says the new style says that you can use either a macron or a doubled letter, but it's not clear if that's supported for keyboard input on various platforms.

Note: bitwize is talking about how to do it on Linux. Which is the best way in my biased opinion. Perhaps not the best mapping for people who use it regularly but is awesome for those who use it irregularly. We can usually guess how to do weird diacritics without having to look it up.

Using the example from the top-level comment, you would install an IME, switch to hiragana mode, start typing "kouen" and convert to kanji when you see the right suggestion.

It might sound complicated at first, but you can do it pretty fast once you get used to it.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/globalization/input/japane...

As others have said, people prefer different ways. My wife (Japanese) writes on Windows (Japanese edition) in romaji, and she's very fast. But she also says that in fact most Japanese (at least of her generation) don't write that way (they presumably use those small kana letters on Japanese-variant keyboards). As a non-native I also write the way she does, though I'm on Linux. I'm not sure why my wife writes using romaji, I should ask.. she wasn't an English speaker or anything, so why that worked for her I don't know.

I don't know now, but for the longest time, Google made a much better Japanese IME for Windows than Microsoft ("Google Japanese Input"). I started using it when running into reliability issues, like disappearing kanji dictionary, or frozen switching between roman and hiragana.

Assuming Microsoft's Japanese IME is still a dumpster fire, and the Google one has not succumbed to Googleshitification, that would be a way to go.

To enable the Microsoft IME there are some rituals to go through like adding the Japanese language and then a Japanese keyboard under that. It will download some materials, like fonts and dictionaries. A reboot is typically not required, I think, unless you make Japanese the primary language.

Once you have the keyboard, LeftShift + LeftAlt chord goes among the input methods. Ctrl + CapsLock toggles hiragana/romaji input. I think these are the same for Google or MS input.

When it comes to input "best" is highly subjective, but with that said: Just adding Japanese support in the system language settings is fine.

Standard Qwerty keyboards are well supported, you'll need to either check the key shortcut to switch between inputs or do it with the mouse if it's infrequent enough.

People using it daily will tweak a lot more, have a straight to IME and straight out of IME key instead of the default switching pattern, potentially add more tweaks to always have half-width space and ponctuation whatever the mode they're in etc., but that's a rabbit-hole you'll be free to fall into.

BTW the reverse works well enough: Windows has a specific mode to force US ANSI on JIS layouts and still use the additional japanese keys. Kinda fun they felt the need to leave that mode in.

MS-IME or Google Japanese Input. (whatever)-Mozc on Linux. Use "IME On" mode for Japanese, "IME Off" mode for alphanumeric text inbetween.

  "shio ha natoriumu[Space][Return][ImeOff](Na)[ImeOn] to enso[Space][Return][ImeOff](Cl)[ImeOn] kara dekite imasu[Return]"
  -> "しおはなとりうむ(Na)とえんそ(Cl)からできています"
  -> "塩はナトリウム(Na)と塩素(Cl)からできています"
  (NOTE: spaces added for legibility)

Most Japanese users use this "romaji" input - which is more vibe heuristics based and not highly consistent with existing romanizations hence the change. Some use "kana" with full 51 Hiragana symbols on JIS keyboard(with ろ/backslash/underscore key to left of RShift, which makes it incompatible with ISO). I think "most people don't do this anymore" remarks refer to the fact that everyone's on the phone, and uses the "flick" input.

> The kara comes from a country name and refers to a style of cooking

My understanding is that the exact etymology is unknown. It's often written with the letter that references the tang dynasty, but the thing is there's no particular reason to think the Chinese introduced the style of cooking to Japan - although it is true that there was such a thing as fried chicken in 7th century China!

Another kanji-ization of the word uses the kara from karate (meaning air or empty, in karate it's "empty hand") and I find this equally plausible as karaage is fried with a very small amount of batter ("in air").

Either way they're both essentially competing "kanji backronyms" seeking to retcon an existing word as spoken; there's no real right or wrong answer.

There's a beach called "らららサンビーチ" in Japan.

While driving there, you can pass a signs that say "LaLaLa Sun Beach" as well as "RaRaRa Sun Beach."

Kunrei makes more sense to a Japanese native, Hepburn makes more sense to a non-Japanese native. As the article points out, Hepburn has come to dominate, so they're simply aligning with it rather than having two systems hanging around.

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

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)

How? Near enough no one was using the Kunrei system for any of that. If anything this will make it more consistent or at least no worse. Macrons are the biggest inconsistency but that’s always been the case.

It was either Hepburn, the English title (i.e. rock instead of rokku), or just most sensibly kana/kanji that would have been used for this everywhere, never other romanisation systems, to within a rounding error.

Elaborate? I’m not following.

    > *RTK or “remembering the kanji” is a system that teaches all kanji before student learn their first word. It’s quite popular online as it lends itself very well to solo studying.

For those unaware, the OP probably means this three part series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembering_the_Kanji

One thing I have found over the years, I have never met a foreigner living in Japan who has used it extensively. (Many were aware of it, but few used it heavily.) However, there is a lively community of online learners who use it. (Don't read that as a judgement against using it; this is simply an observation.)

I was surprised to read this part:

    > a system that teaches all kanji before student learn their first word

I have never heard this description before. I always thought it was a learning aid to use mnemonics to remember the meaning of individual kanji. If someone can complete all volumes of RTK before "learn[ing] their first word", I would be stunned. It would be a feat of super-human level of memorization and recall. That said, the Internet is a huge place with billions of people. There will be somebody, somewhere who took this path and is happy to tell you about their success using it.

Sure, and in a Japanese song, "sensei" can yield four beats or notes SE/N/SE/I.

But spelling out and singing aren't normal speech. Spelling/singing can break apart diphthongs, like NAI becomes NA-I.

生 is not written with い due to the /e:/ having a different sound from that one in from おねえさん. It does not (when you aren't spelling). It is written the way it is for ancient historic reasons.

> Similarly, the OU in 東京 (toukyou) and the OO in 大きな (ookina) are different

No, they are't.

> I hope this helps.

こう言うバカな戯言は少しも誰にも役に立つはずないんだぜ。

I have always felt furigana bridges that gap well enough in written learning. The downside is that it might become a crutch, but it can't for long if you are serious about learning reading. Native materials pretty quickly drop furigana.

Like with a lot of things like this, if you learn for long enough the differences in the major approaches work themselves out.

It tends to be standardized within a single country.

> As a native English speaker, I have learned this watching non-natives try to learn English spelling over the years. It is hell! I studied French in middle school and high school. I remember there being a similar level of ambiguity in their orthography (similar to English).

Yes. I think english is even slightly worth than french wrt spelling/sound mismatches, but you can call me biased. Moreover, William the Conqueror, who brought civilization to England, also brought the inconsistencies of the french spelling with him.

> I wonder: Why not spell check before you send?

Well, some of my coworkers don't either, from french to french. And up to recently in most programs it was a bother to switch back and forth between 2 languages.

But really, that's probably about common laziness; the typos you mention can be caught by proof-reading before sending, which can also catch other mistakes like missing words or inconsistent sentences caused rewrites.

Proof-reading just after writing is not the best tho, as you tend to skip words because it is "too fresh". I try to introduce some time gap between the too (for instance, proof-reading after lunch or the next morning).

You are very, very likely to find people who prefer "sushi wo tabemasu", because standards are great.

And when I can't think it up, I have a bookmark for my locale's upstream compose sequences file: https://github.com/X11Libre/mirror.fdo.libX11/blob/master/nl... and/or https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libx11/-/blob/master...

It was almost never quite Hepburn either, usually shi/chi/tsu/fu/ji with no di/du, but often alongside wo/he/ha (in roughly that order of likelihood, not always consistently), macrons almost never, っち is cch. Ironically, I have to imagine there's more "bastardized Nihonsiki" out there than "bastardized Kunreisiki", because the differences between the two are exactly the ones that matter when typing them out, and of course everyone in the j/e scenes is by far most often inputting wa-puro ro-maji (and of course that's ji, not zi, because which one is on the home row?).

In short, the usual infelicities of Japanese romanization as practiced in the wild on keyboards people actually have, and there is a method to the madness but it's not what any of the standards reflect.

Same with image viewers on the web. Google, twitter, imgur, and others seem hell bent on making the shittiest possible zoom and pan implementations to look at images.

If you frequently write the same characters, it's straightforward to create your own keyboard layout that matches your usage, using https://software.sil.org/ukelele/

"all" might be a bit of an exaggeration, but the philosophy is to learn to recognize roughly 2000 kanji before starting the actual language learning. Volume 2 and 3 are supposed to complement more normal language learning.

The theory is based on the authors experience seeing Chinese and Korean students learn much, much faster than their western peers in Japanese language classes, coupled with an argument for "If you can read 50% of characters, you still can't read"

I'm surprised you've never come across this, as it is in the foreword.

> There will be somebody, somewhere who took this path and is happy to tell you about their success using it.

I met this somebody in Japan. If I remember correctly, he spend a summer "doing" RTK, then took 1 semester Japanese at his home university, went on exchange to Japan for two semesters, and after finishing his first semester abroad he passed JLPT 2 (not N2 - this was before they added the N)

Good for him. He was a strong student, but I wouldn't recommend it.

Standardizations can be notoriously inconsistent[1], disregarded[2] or evolve fast[3].

There’s a surprising amount of interesting articles on wikipedia about that.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)#Spelling_re...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_dialect

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensational_spelling

And standardised within an empire.

Do you have an academic source that describes this difference in pronunciation in native speakers in normal usage?

Yes, for instance こうり （小売）is completely different from こおり （氷）.

If you're trying to say that when those two denote /o:/ it is a different /o:/, you are laughably wrong.

It is not reliably discernible as a statistical fact you can gather from a population sample of native speakers over many words, if they are asked to speak normally (not using spelling as emphasis, or using the words in a song).

I’m new to the language and thought these would be the same. But I just listened to some words with the two and the おお definitely has like a bigger o sound. That’s quite subtle.

Should we also change other languages’ orthographies to make them easier to pronounce for English speakers? “Bonzhoor” instead of “Bonjour”?

負う and 王 are both hepburn-romanized as ou though. 方 and 頬 (hou vs hoo) is a better example. I don't really think native speakers still distinguish these.

Feel free to try listening yourself though:

頬, note that it has multiple pronunciations but we only care about hoo: https://forvo.com/word/%E9%A0%AC/#ja

方 https://forvo.com/word/%E6%96%B9%E3%80%80%EF%BC%88%E3%81%BB%...

In some cases though there is still a clear difference in pronunciation for most speakers, ex 塔 vs 遠

    > The main issues probably arise on official documents and stuff with financial impact.

Do you have evidence of this? Else, I doubt it. Most official documents will also require your residence address. If you are signing any official documents, they will check your zairyu or My Number card for both photographic similarity, romaji (roman character) spelling of your name, and residence address. All of these in combination can easily uniquely identify a foreign resident in Japan.

We are talking about writing/spelling, aren't we?

Why would you want to confuse the hell out of those learning Japanese by spelling せんせい (sensei) using an E with a macron, a la "sensē," when that is not at all how you spell it or type in phonetically in an IME? Having a one-to-one romanization for each Hiragana phonetic is far more logical for learners, who are essentially the target of romanized Japanese, than creating a Hooked on Phonics version that is completely disconnected from writing reality.

I also think your comment, written in Japanese, saying, "This stupid nonsense isn't going to be of any use to anyone," is both ignorant and uncalled for.

"Better" depends on what you care about. _konniti-wa_ (which is the Kunrei-siki romanization of こんにちは, _konniti-ha_ is Nihon-shiki form that preserves the irregular use of は as topic-marking /wa/) and _susi-o_ (again, Kunrei-siki ignores a native script orthographic irregularity and romanizes を as _o_ not _wo_ ) are more consistent with the native phonological system of Japanese. In Japanese coronal consonants like /t/ and /s/ are regularly palatalized to /tS/ and /S/ before the vowel /i/, and there's no reason to treat _chi_ and _ti_ as meaningfully different sequences of sounds. Linguists writing about Japanese phonology use it instead of Hepburn for good reason.

Obviously, being more transparent to English-readers is also a reasonable goal a romanization system might have, and if that's your goal the Hepburn is a better system. I don't have a strong opinion about which system the Japanese government should treat as official, and realistically neither one is going to go away. But it's simply not the case that Hepburn is a better romanization scheme for every purpose.

But in the case of ō, you can only use a doubled letter if the underlying word is おお. If it is おう then you don't have a doubled letter you can use; you need "ou" and that's not Hepburn any more. It is "wāpuro rōmaji" (word processor romaji).

About 25 years ago, I studied Hebrew. It is a fascinating language to me (as is Arabic). One of the features, weirdly similar to furigana, is the "dots" placed above vowels to indicates how to pronouce words. (Sorry, I don't know the technical linguistic term to describe these dots.) In regular texts, these dots are excluded, and readers are expected to (essentially) have the dots memorized. I always struggled to read Hebrew text without the dots.

In the last 10 years in Japan, more and more goverment documents are now available with furigana. Sometimes the edition is called "Friendly Japanese" (yasashii nihongo / やさしい日本語). The best explaination I can think of: There has been a dramatic rise in the number of non-university-educated foreign workers who have come to Japan on labor contracts -- factory workers, farm workers, hotel staff, shop staff, etc. They need to live their daily lives in Japan, but will struggle with native-level Japanese documents, so the gov't (both national and local) make an effort to reduce this friction. I expect the level of support from local gov'ts will be very much correlated to the number of foreign workers in their districts.

For people not familiar with Japanese, finding any info about a Japanese-language game can be a pain. They may have a Japanese representation, an official romanized name, a community romanized name using a different system… plus may also go by an outright English-language name, in some circles, which may (or may not) overlap with the name of an English-language port (if it exists). Then consider that some games have pretty extreme and confusing name variants in various editions or on different platforms, and those may go by different names in different contexts.

You can see the same game go by three different names on a community forum, Wikipedia, and a catalogue of games + md5sums for a system (you might think the md5sum could act as a Rosetta Stone here… but less so than you’d think, especially in the specific context of an English speaker and Japanese games, as you sometimes need some specific, old, oddball and slightly-broken dump of a game to get the one a particular English patch requires… and god knows what name you’ll find that under, but probably not the same md5sum as a clean dump)

The only bright spot in this is that if you can find a Japanese game on Wikipedia the very first superscript-citation almost always lists the official Japanese title in Japanese script on hover. That’s a life saver. (Presumably all of this is easier if you know at least some Japanese)

Though after I posted my comment I realized they mean they’re switching to another existing system (which I think is already widely used in gaming circles? Not sure though) which isn’t so bad. At least it’s not another one being added to the mix.

Is it hiccough or hiccup in the US?

Should the romanization reflect the irregular sounds in the spoken language? Or should it reflect the regular groupings of the kana characters?

OR....

Should it reflect how one would type it on a keyboard in order to get the correct Japanese characters (ひらがな、カタカナ、漢字)?

My favorite Linux layout was US International + AltGr dead keys. Basically a US keyboard, but if you want an accented character, just press the AltGr+Accent key, then the letter.

I got the same behavior on macOS by using https://github.com/carjorvaz/macos-us-altgr-intl/blob/master...

Whoosh :)

> If you're trying to say that when those two denote /o:/ it is a different /o:/, you are laughably wrong.

There's literally a different sound, which is why the difference in kana exists. Disagree if you like -- as I said, it's subtle -- but I don't know why you feel the need to be insulting about it. Writing an inaccurate non-kana symbol for the two sounds is no more an argument than saying that the sounds are identical because they share a common romanization.

There are some words where you can more clearly hear the difference than others. Consider, for example, the pronunciation of 紅茶, vs your example of 氷. It's not wrong to pronounce the former as a long o, but you can hear the difference when natives say it. Similarly, こういう is not said as こおいう, and 公園 is not こおえん.

You’ll hear it more easily with time. It’s hard to completely separate stuff like this from context (i.e. it’s far more rare to have a collision in sound that makes sense if you know the rest of the sentence), but it does matter for discriminating between words when you’re trying to look words up, for example.

> Should we also change other languages’ orthographies to make them easier to pronounce for English speakers? “Bonzhoor” instead of “Bonjour”?

Already done.

- Komen ça va? - Mo byin, mærsi.

We don't have anything against https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Creole, do we?

We could start by standardising English, so that pronunciation was always the same for a given letter order.

If French didn't use the Roman alphabet natively, you might have a point.

At some point you might as well use Roman characters the way the Cherokee alphabet does - which is to say, uses some of the shapes without paying attention to what sounds they made in English.

Japanese people don't read romanized Japanese. Even Japanese learners don't read romanized Japanese.

Romanization is, by and large, a thing that exists for people who already know European/Western languages.

Do you think Japanese people actually read and write in kunrei-shiki? No, they write using their own letters.

Romanization is an approximation that exists primarily for two purposes: 1. to express Japanese terms in other languages and 2. to enable typing Japanese on a computer. It’s silly to enforce kunrei-shiki, a system rarely used in practice, in the name of "accuracy" based on arbitrary criteria. Romanized spellings will never be accurate for obvious reasons.

Given the purpose of romanization, it’s more practical to choose a system that allows non-Japanese speakers to pronounce words more closely aligned with the correct pronunciation.

English is the top language spoken in all the world; it would be lovely to facilitate better communication with that population.

> “Bonzhoor” instead of “Bonjour”

English is already heavily Norman-ized. Half of our vocabulary - including the word pronounce - comes from French.

>English

Use *h₂enǵʰ-ish please.

Nope! Writing 王 as "ou" is "wāpuro rōmaji" or modified Hepburn. Proper Hepburn wants ō. Which cannot be used for 負う.

You're looking at the checks done by a human. And I'd argue those are already problematic enough, yes I've heard of first hand stories of people stuck at the airport explaining that the spelling on they passport and their reservation name being different. People pay attention on international flights now, but still fall for the other traps. I remember a guy buying concert tickets with the most common spelling and getting stuck at the gate as they had nothing on them matching it.

The worst part is the automated checks, and sure it's a huge PITA. I've spent 1h30 last weekend at a docomo shop to have my name recognized by their system, with the guy looking at the papers and not understanding why it wouldn't do it. That's with near perfect matching between the documents. Imagine having spellings mismatched.

Banks also have a different matching system (Katakana based, with a string length limit, for account matching, and another WTF system for card owner matching), which is screwed in its very own way. That's one of the main reasons for the debacle with the MyNumber Card bank account matching last year.

> uniquely identify a foreign resident

Uniquely being identified is the easy part. Being _properly_ identified is something else altogether.

> Having a one-to-one romanization for each Hiragana phonetic is far more logical for learners

It depends on the learner’s (and textbook author’s) goals. Sometimes, having a phonetic transcription of the more common pronunciation is a more important consideration.

Historically, Hepburn’s transcription pre-dates Japanese orthographic reform. He was writing “kyō” back when it was spelled けふ. Having one-to-one correspondence to kana was not a goal.

So writing sensē is kinda on-brand (even if Hepburn didn’t write like this, because in his times it still wasn’t pronounced with long e).

Those vowel diacritics in Semitic languages are called matres lectionis.

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

They are called diacritics.

"ou" is fine too, actually. See the proposal p. 14 (=16 in the PDF): https://www.bunka.go.jp/seisaku/bunkashingikai/sokai/pdf/942...

(To differentiate between the case where it's actually two vowels, you have to put an apostrophe inbetween; their example is 小唄 -> ko'uta.)

Nothing new is happening here - this is the government moving towards formally recommending the system that's already most widely used.

No I understood. I just failed to see the relevance.

> 方 and 頬 (hou vs hoo) is a better example.

As a native Japanese speaker, this example is eye-opening. I hadn't even realized that the u in 方 is pronounced as /o:/ — I believe most Japanese people haven't either, despite unknowingly pronounce it that way.

Also, I have no idea how to Hepburn-romanize 方 vs 頬, 負う vs 王, and 塔 vs 遠. If I had to romanize, I would just write it as whatever the romaji input method understands correctly (hou/hoo, ou/ou, and tou/too, in this case).

Could you elaborate on the last sentence? Wiktionary claims they're pronounced the same modulo pitch accent, but Wiktionary's phonetic transcriptions are (mostly?) auto-generated AFAIK.

In plain-text romanization, the standard and expected spelling is “sensei.” That’s the formal, conventional representation, especially for typing and learning.

Phonetically, in natural speech, the vowel often compresses toward a long /e/ sound, so you may hear something closer to sense or sensee depending on context and speaker.

In stylistic writing (e.g. light novels or dialogue), you might occasionally see phonetic renderings to reflect speech, but in formal or instructional contexts, “sensei” remains the correct and expected form.

In short:

• Orthography: sensei

• Phonetics: can vary in actual speech

• Stylistic writing: sometimes bends toward pronunciation

Different layers, different purposes.

I think this may mostly be a case of people talking past each other.

One side is focusing on orthographic convention (how it’s written and typed), the other on phonetic realization (how it’s actually pronounced in speech).

Those aren’t contradictory claims — they’re just different layers of the same thing.

> 負う and 王 are both hepburn-romanized as ou though

No, it's ou vs ō.

> E with a macron, a la "sensē,"

Sorry, yes. That is my mistake. Hepburn doesn't use any such ē notation. Hepburn preserves えい and ええ as "ei" and "ee", conflating only "ou" and "oo" into ō (when they appear in a combination that denotes the long o:).

I don't see how kunrei-shiki is useful at all. If I want to write Japanese words so non-Japanese speakers can pronounce them approximately, then Hepburn is the way to go. If I want to write Japanese words so Japanese speakers can read them best, I'll write them in actual Japanese. This isn't 1975, and computers are perfectly able to render hiragana, katakana, and kanji. What do I need kunrei-shiki for? I've been living in Japan for years now, and have never found a use for it.

Even with official names of media you can get stuck.

Consider 彼氏彼女の事情[1]. The Japanese name is the same for the Manga and Anime, but the official names for the US localization of each are different (the manga went with a romanization of an abbreviation of the Japanese name Kare Kano while the Anime went with a translation of the full name His and Her Circumstances.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kare_Kano

What I’m complaining arout is that it seems to only be designed for English speakers, not for European language speakers.

What I’m complaining about is that the romanization is based specifically on English, arbitrarily chosen from all languages that natively use the Latin alphabet. For example, what’s transcribed as “shi” is only “aligned with the correct pronunciation” for English speakers. In other languages it would be more accurately transcribed as “ši”, “szi“, “chi”, “schi” or even “si”.

The difference in kana was not recently selected in order to represent a feature of the contemporary language. It is historic!!!

And the way English generally uses the Roman alphabet (obviously excluding the zillions of irregularities) isn't that far off from how most European languages use the Roman alphabet.

I'd expect that Spanish, German and French speakers would benefit just as much as English speakers from these changes.

Oh, I thought the added u and the bar were just two different ways to indicated that the o is stretched (the u looking like a workaround to avoid special characters).

It originates from a Meiji-era society that quite seriously proposed ditching kanji/kana entirely in favor of romanized Japanese.

This actually happened in Vietnam, and Korea comes close although they use the Hangul script, not the Latin alphabet.

終末何してますか？忙しいですか？救ってもらっていいですか？ has an "English" title on it's Japanese cover beside the Japanese one "Do you have what THE END? Are you busy? Shall you save XXX?". I'm guessing the author did it themselves. The capitalisation on THE END is presumably supposed to reflect on 終末 (shuumatsu - the end [often used for apocalypses etc]) punning on 週末 (shuumatsu - weekend) and the XXX is because the Japanese title gets to omit the subject and English can't.

Needless to say, the official English translations didn't keep that title, going with "What are you doing at the end of the world? Are you busy? Will you save us?"

Your comment is astonishing.

If you know the word 方, that it is /ho:/, and you know that it has a う in it when written out, how can you not know that う stands for making the o long? The only vowel is the long o.

Japanese kindergarten kids can recognize hiragana words with "おう", correctly identifying it as /o:/. By the time they learn the 方 kanji they would have seen it written in hiragana upmpteen times, like AよりBのほうがいい and whatnot.

Hi, ursAxZA. Yes, you're describing an "elision," which is where speakers drop or blur sounds together to make speech more fluid, like the way some people say, "Sup?" when they mean, "What's up?" or replace the T with a glottal stop in the word "mountain," as they do in Utah.

I wholeheartedly agree that it is fine to write things like "Sup?" when appropriate, such as dialogue in a novel. You see this all the time in Japanese TV, books, magazines, manga, etc. However, I disagree that elisions should dictate how we spell words in regular written communication, especially when discussing a tool meant to help non-native Japanese speakers learn the language. And as the parent poster pointed out, when singing, you would sing "se n se i" rather than "se n se e." The same is true of haiku and other instances where the morae (linguistic beats similar to syllables in English) are clearly enunciated.

As I said, sensei is technically four morae and different than "sensē," and, in my opinion, should remain that way in Romaji, it being a writing system and one method for inputting Japanese text.

Thanks for the respectful conversation. I appreciate the points you brought up.

塔 can be pronounced as tou, too, or somewhere between the two. It depends on the speaker, speaking style, and possibly dialect. Either way, Japanese speakers rely more on context and pitch accent than actual pronunciation, so it communicates fine.

That's right. That ē thing was a pretty stupid gaffe I made.

Some modern adaptations of his transcription do, however. E.g. Modern Japanese Grammar: A Practical Guide uses the transcription “sensee” (they consistently don’t use macrons in this book: e.g. they use oo for ō, etc.).

Hepburn didn’t write “sensē” himself because it 1880s it was still pronounced “ei”, not “ē”. If it were pronounced like it’s pronounced nowadays, you can bet he’d spell it with ē.

I think the confusion here is in the placement of the vowels. おお and おう do sound identical when pronounced as a single unit, but the おう in 小売 (こ.うり) isn't a single unit, it's just a お that happens to be next to a う

Thanks — and yes, I think we’re essentially aligned now.

Once we separate the layers — orthography, pronunciation, and stylistic rendering — the friction mostly disappears.

Romanization is a writing system with its own conventions; speech naturally undergoes reductions and elisions; and creative writing sometimes pulls closer to the spoken register.

Different layers, different functions — and the confusion only arises when they’re collapsed into one.

Appreciate the thoughtful discussion.

Calling out your own mistake takes toughness.

You owned it — that matters.

Well, speaking for myself, I internalized how う is pronounced differently in different contexts when I was young, and by now I've almost forgotten there's a difference I need to be conscious of.

When I hear /ho:/ in a certain context, "ほう(方)" immediately comes to mind, without noticing that what I heard was a long o. To me it's just the う sound. And if someone pointed to their face while saying /ho:/, I'd think it's the お sound as in "ほお(頬)".

No worries, and I forgive you for the sardonic Japanese. I wish you the best.

> as tou, too, or somewhere between the two.

I see what you did there.

> And the way English generally uses the Roman alphabet (obviously excluding the zillions of irregularities) isn't that far off from how most European languages use the Roman alphabet.

Its not far off from the union of how all other European languages use the Roman alphabet, would be closer to accurate.

Because they're a native speaker. Native speakers are often utterly oblivious to the 'rules' of their own languages.

Every time I read a rule about my mother tongue (Mandarin) online I was like, lol what nonsense foreigners made up... And then I realize that rule does exist. I just have internalized it for so long.

> 塔 can be pronounced as tou

No it can't, unless someone is spelling it out, or singing it in a song where it is given two notes, or just hyper-correcting their speech based on their knowledge of writing.

Annoyed speech and such can break words into their morae for empahsis, which breaks up dipthongs.

E.g. angry Japanese five-year-old:

ga kkō ni i ki ta ku nā i!!! (I don't wanna go to school!!!)

"nā i" is not the regular way of saying "nai". The idea that "nai" has that as an alternative pronunciation is a strawman.

sugē

Sure, but the point is this isn't really making romanized Japanese more English-like. It's making it more similar to how just about every other language already uses the Roman alphabet. This isn't an Anglo-centric thing, it's just good common sense - unless your goal is to make it harder to pronounce your language properly, which seems like an obvious own-goal.

A typical example for English is the adjective order.

You're right. I looked up 現代仮名遣いの告示 [0] for the first time, and it says 塔（とう） is officially pronounced as "too". I had it backwards - I thought that 塔 is "tou", but due to the varying sounds of う, people could (and often preferred to) pronounce it as "too" in everyday speech.

This kind of misconception seems not uncommon. There's an FAQ on NHK's website [1] that addresses the question of whether 言う（いう） is pronounced "iu" or "yuu". The answer is "yuu", and the article make it clear that: "It's not that [iu] is used for polite/careful speech and [yuu] for casual speech - there is no such distinction."

I think native speakers learn words by hearing them and seeing them written in hiragana, before learning the underlying rules, so they know "too" is written as とう, but might not realize that とう shouldn't be pronounced as "tou" or いう as "iu". These are at least less obvious than cases like は in こんにちは never being "ha".

Personally, if I heard someone say 塔 as "tou" or 言う as "iu", I probably wouldn't count it as incorrect, nor would I even notice the phonetic difference.

[0] https://www.bunka.go.jp/kokugo_nihongo/sisaku/joho/joho/kiju...

[1] https://www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/research/kotoba/20160801_2.html

> It's making it more similar to how just about every other language already uses the Roman alphabet.

There is no way "every other language already uses the Roman alphabet."

Many languages are internally consistent in how they use it, but those that are aren't consistent with each other. And then there is English, which does pretty much everything any other language which uses the Roman alphabet does somewhere, and probably a few that none of the other extant languages normally using that alphabet do with it, on top.

About 30% of people worldwide use a language that's not written in Roman alphabet.

Additionally, being written in Roman alphabet doesn't neccessarily mean it's clear how to pronounce it. Hungarians calls their country "Magyarország", but unless you know Hungarian, you will be surprised with how it's pronounced. Same as "Chenonceaux", "Tekirdağ" or "Crkvina".

Adjective order in English is basically that most essential qualities of the object go closest to the head. There are lists out there that try to break this down into categories of adjective ("opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose"), and to some extent the anglo intuitions on which sorts of properties are more or less essential are not trivial, but it's not as arbitrary as people want to make it out to be.

Those are especially pathological cases, and not especially relevant to this discussion, as the romanization rules are explicitly designed to be consistent.

Worcestershire.

This. People act like it's a hyper-complicated rule that English speakers magically infer, when in reality, a) other languages do it, and b) it's a much simpler rule (that you've given) which someone overcomplicated.

As a counterexample (in line with your explanation), consider someone snarking on the WallStreetBets forum: "Come on, guys, this is supposed to be Wall Street bets, not Wall Street prudent hedges!" Adjective order changes because the intended significance changes. (Normally it would be "prudent Wall Street hedges".)

Side note: please don't nitpick about whether "Wall Street" is functionally an adjective here. The same thing would happen if the forum had been named "FinancialBets".

We're not talking about words like worcestershire. I'm talking about words like "bat" "monkey" "chimichanga". Those that follow the rules. There can't possibly be irregular spellings using the romanizations we're talking about!

People "overcomplicate" the rule because they find counterexamples to the simple rule.

It's a fool's errand because the way human language works is that people happily accept odd exceptions by rote memory. So the rule simply says that there exist these exceptions. Also, there is something called euphony: speakers find utterances questionable if they are not in some canonical form they are used to hearing. For instance "black & white" is preferred over "white & black".

The rules boil down to "what people are used to hearing, regardless of the underlying grammar offering other possibilities".