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Hepburn Romanization: How to Read Japanese in the Latin Alphabet

18 points miuraboy 1 day ago 12 comments

motionlessveloc 1 hour ago | parent

As someone intimately familiar with this topic, the article here is mostly correct but gets a lot of the small details wrong.

Probably the most important missing part here is the reason non-Hepburn systems like Kunrei stuck around for so long: they were designed to replace the Japanese script completely. This sounds outlandish today, but they were invented during the early Meiji years when Japan was adopting Western innovations and abandoning ancient traditions at breakneck speed. And because their target was thus Japanese people, not foreigners, they didn't need to worry about English phonology.

Incidentally, the Chinese pinyin system was also designed to replace Chinese writing, and Mao came quite close to abolishing Chinese characters entirely during the Cultural Revolution. Which also explains why it uses letters like x, c and q in ways that English readers find wildly unintuitive.

canjobear 1 hour ago | parent

> Mao came quite close to abolishing Chinese characters entirely during the Cultural Revolution

This was indeed the Communists’ original plan, but the real story is more interesting. Before taking over the country the plan was to replace characters with a pinyin-like system Latinxua Sin Wenz[1] and a whole generation in the north was taught to read this. After 1949, Mao was talked out of Romanization by none other than Stalin, who told him the Chinese language deserves its own script. Pinyin was designed after that, officially as a teaching tool, but probably by people who secretly still believed in more radical writing reform.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinxua_Sin_Wenz

quuxplusone 24 minutes ago | parent

Highly recommend on this subject John DeFrancis' "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy" (1984)!

https://archive.org/details/chineselanguagef0000defr/

Thrymr 1 hour ago | parent

It is remarkable that some countries actually have switched writing systems in modern times. Turkey did it in the 1920s after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, for example (replaces an Arabic alphabet with a Roman one).

kps 53 minutes ago | parent

What surprises me (only a little) is that Japan continues to use Chinese characters when they've got a perfectly good native syllabary.

nrr 17 minutes ago | parent

I don't know if this is from the perspective of having learned Mandarin in elementary school first or if Japanese folks feel similarly, but reading words like, e.g., だいがくいんせい versus 大学院生 is actually a little more annoying because I have to scan more of the line to read the word in question. This is notwithstanding the effect that hiragana has in highlighting grammatical structures; it's a lot like setting off Finnish case endings and verb conjugations in a different color.

At least, that's the reason why I prefer still having kanji around.

lyall 59 minutes ago | parent

I'm surprised that articles like this that are pretty clearly AI-generated get any sort of traction here. Is it because people think the topic is interesting but don't actually care about the content?

> Three Japanese words, three Hepburn transcriptions. The letters you already know, telling you what they sound like.

I mean come on.

refactor_master 56 minutes ago | parent

> The letters you already know, telling you what they sound like

So… letters?

japgolly 14 minutes ago | parent

Detecting AI writing is a skill that not everyone has.

rkido 59 minutes ago | parent

Minor correction on the article: Kunrei-shiki doesn't have a 1-to-1 mapping between kana and letters. You can see that directly in the table they show. Only Nihon-shiki does. Kunrei-shiki is the worst of both worlds.

That's why Nihon-shiki is and will likely always remain the best system for serious students of Japanese - if you even need it at all. But then again, if you're just starting out, the best place to start is usually to immediately start learning kana.

pmcarlton 25 minutes ago | parent

Yes, several things are just wrong here, e.g.

"…久保 becomes "Kubo" without the long vowel marked at all…" -- there is no long vowel! Just plain Kubo is correct.

"Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki optimize for a systematic, one-to-one mapping between kana and romanization. One kana, one romanization, always, with no exceptions." (Kunrei-shiki: exceptions! 猫は庭へ魚を運ぶ Neko wa niwa e sakana o hakobu)

Also: "Romanization is a scaffold, not a destination." ? I TOO AM A HUMAN WRITER WHO WRITES WITH MY OWN FINGERS.

But the history of the Romaji movement is indeed interesting - there were influential people who were quite serious about moving entirely to romaji at one point! It would have changed everything.

japgolly 8 minutes ago | parent

> Kunreisiki is also better for serious Japanese learners as it greatly simplifies the description of Japanese grammar: cf. matu/matte/matimasu (all with the same verb stem mat-) vs. Hepburn matsu/matte/machimasu (with 3 different verb stems)."

This is a silly argument because anyone learning Japanese is going to need to learn how to pronounce it anyway. Also "serious Japanese learners" would likely be using kana.