6 ms·

I'm honestly surprised Hepburn wasn't the official standard yet. It sounds way closer to the spoken sounds, at least to my western ears. > The council’s recomm

• wyan 9mo ago
  Not closer to the spoken sounds, closer to English orthography.
  • Theofrastus 9mo ago
    Native German speaker here. It fits very well here, too
  • mono442 9mo ago
    It works better with other European languages' orthography too.
• mytailorisrich 9mo ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihon-shiki
  • Theofrastus 9mo ago
    The political aspect might be a big part of why and how the systems are chosen. Didn't know about that!
  • jinushaun 9mo ago
    Politics aside, Hepburn is better. You can’t seriously say you prefer “konniti-ha” and “susi-wo tabemasu”
    • xigoi 9mo ago
      Should we also change other languages’ orthographies to make them easier to pronounce for English speakers? “Bonzhoor” instead of “Bonjour”?
      • QuercusMax 9mo ago
        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.
      • wewtyflakes 9mo ago
        English is the top language spoken in all the world; it would be lovely to facilitate better communication with that population.
        • QuercusMax 9mo ago
          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.
          • dragonwriter 9mo ago
            > 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.
• ranger_danger 9mo ago
  > 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.
• usrnm 9mo ago
  The popularity of Hepburn has a lot more to do with the English language than the Japanese language
• shikon7 9mo ago
  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?
• z2 9mo ago
  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.
  • nth233 9mo ago
    Not exactly. In the Wade–Giles system: xi → hsi ji → chi ci → tz'u
• retrac 9mo ago
  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.
  • Macha 9mo ago
    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.
• tkgally 9mo ago
  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.
• fennecfoxy 9mo ago
  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.