> The principle comes with a trade-off. Hepburn is phonetic for English speakers, not systematic for kana. While that is true, the kana themselves are not full

> The principle comes with a trade-off. Hepburn is phonetic for English speakers, not systematic for kana. While that is true, the kana themselves are not fully systematic for capturing Japanese. Hepburn can capture features that kana do not! How about this set of examples, which shows both an advantage and drawback of Hepburn. The hiragana sequence こうり (ko-u-ri) could be several things. one is 小売 (retail) where the division is こ・うり. Or it could be 公理 (axiom, self-evident truth) where the dividion is こう・り. Here the う in こう is no longer u but a vowel lengthening mark. Hepburn spells these words differnetly: kouri and kōri. Now, within this same example cluster we ecounter this: the word for ice is こおり （ko-o-ri). Unfortunately, Hepburn has this as kõri, creating an ambiguity not found in kana. A modification to Hepburn allowing (or rather requiring) the spelling koori would resolve that.