[vallanceroad]

> I'm not sure how I feel about it. I feel like it feels kind of hollow. Like there's a lot of energy in it, but the vocaloid part just feels so emotionless.

In Japan, the term is "denpa" (電波ソング). Denpa music is intentionally strange as it is catchy, and hypnotic as it is awkward. There are many producers creating high-BPM electronic vocaloid music that is chaotic for effect. It is a bit more twee than the western sounds, as you mentioned, but it can be quite enjoyable if you're in the right mood.

More on denpa music: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denpa_song

Nanahira playlist, an example of a vocaloid character: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHIyvhJadXM

Explaining Vocaloid in 3 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GODXMGAMpVc

Also, I think you'd enjoy the Song Exploder podcast. If you haven't heard it already, check out the episode where 100 gecs break down how Money Machine was created:

https://songexploder.net/100-gecs

[jowsie]

Nanahira is a real person, not a vocaloid

[kokocute]

There's no overlap between denpa and vocaloid; I think you'd have a very difficult time having the vocaloid sing out of tune in a charming way.

ななひら (nanahira) is probably the most well known denpa artist, but she mostly sings normal songs now I think (and has a lovely voice doing so).

ココ is my favourite denpa artist https://youtu.be/2wl8Ofce8TE

[thaumasiotes]

> In Japan, the term is "denpa" (電波ソング)

In Japanese, there is no distinction between syllable-final [n] and syllable-final [m]. But in English there is. Traditional romanizations of Japanese will transcribe this as "dempa", for the obvious reasons that (a) that is what the Japanese spelling says; and (b) that is also how the word is pronounced.

I often see English speakers get very confused over exotic modern transcriptions such as "denba" or "senpai", believing there must be a reason they are written that way. But I'm not sure what that reason is supposed to be.

[naniwaduni]

Following the "spelling" surely suggests consistently spelling 電(でん) as "den", not alternating n/m depending on the environment? The Japanese don't write different んs for 電波(でんぱ)・電流(でんりゅう)・電話(でんわ).

Attempting to approximate pronunciation is a valid theory of transcription, but one which also ought to prescribe that 電気(でんき) be transcribed as dengki; English is not much less discerning of syllable-final [n] vs [ŋ] as it is vs [m]. This is not a position I've ever seen anyone defend in earnest, though.

(Romanization for anglophone is a bit of a lost cause anyway, since we're going to fuck up the vowels no matter what you do.)

[thaumasiotes]

> Attempting to approximate pronunciation is a valid theory of transcription, but one which also ought to prescribe that 電気(でんき) be transcribed as dengki; English is not much less discerning of syllable-final [n] vs [ŋ] as it is vs [m].

That is blatantly incorrect. English converts syllable-final [n] to [ŋ] when followed by a velar exactly the same way Japanese does, and English spelling reflects that. Consider the English words "think", "clunky", or "handkerchief".

[naniwaduni]

Sure, now show us lack of assimilation to a subsequent bilabial (in a context where /nk/ does assimilate), which is what Japanese does and that you're implying English does differently (it doesn't). English has it baked in so deeply that most would-be /np/s are already spelled <mp>, which muddies the waters a bit, but these past few days have given us plenty of clips of people pronouncing "government", haven't they?

[thaumasiotes]

What are you trying to show? You seem to agree that the English spelling of /nt/ is "nt", the English spelling of /ŋk/ is "nk", and the English spelling of /mp/ is "mp". There is no possibility of "np", "nb", or "nm".

How would that suggest that it's reasonable to spell the Japanese word "dempa" as "denpa"?

For demonstrating lack of assimilation of /n/ to following bilabial, there are a couple distinct questions you might ask. It's very frequent for people to preserve the tongue gesture associated with /n/, because a bilabial stop doesn't use the tongue and so [n] is easily coarticulated. But that turns into /mp/ or /mb/ over time because the difference is not easy to hear. In contrast, for a word such as "impossible" where this process completed many hundreds of years ago, the tongue is not used at all in the pronunciation of /mp/. This is a kind of lack of assimilation.

You can also see lack of assimilation in the very people who go to special efforts to pronounce [n] in Japanese words where that is inappropriate.

Note that the English and Japanese phenomena you're talking about are very distinct. This is a fact about the historical development of sounds in English (and Latin...) that doesn't apply to current English, where a sequence like /ng/ will often be preserved across word boundaries. ("One ghost"; this is the only context in which such a sequence can occur at all.[1]) English maintains a robust distinction between /n/ and /m/ and a weaker one between /ŋ/ and the other two.[2]

In contrast, Japanese ん assimilates to whatever follows it, and in the case that nothing follows it it may (rarely) be realized as nothing more than nasalization of the preceding vowel. Word boundaries are not relevant. Japanese does not have a phonemic syllable-final /n/ or /m/ (or /ŋ/). It has a single sound (usually indicated /N/ by specialists, apparently, due to even more weirdnesses that it involves) that gets realized differently in different contexts.

So again - what would justify representing the Japanese sound as "n" regardless of context in languages where, unlike in Japanese, the distinction between "n" and "m" is meaningful?

[1] You say that most would-be /np/s are already spelled "mp", but this is false - the words that are spelled "mp" changed long ago, and do not represent attempts by modern speakers to pronounce an /np/ sequence. They represent attempts to pronounce an /mp/ sequence.

[2] Why weaker? /ŋ/ doesn't have the status the other two do; it cannot begin a syllable. And it makes for a less than perfect contrast with /n/ and /m/ because it has a fairly pronounced effect on the vowel that precedes it, which makes drawing a clean contrast difficult.

[naniwaduni]

> What are you trying to show? You seem to agree that the English spelling of /nt/ is "nt", the English spelling of /ŋk/ is "nk", and the English spelling of /mp/ is "mp". There is no possibility of "np", "nb", or "nm".

Consider "inpainting", "unbiased", and (as suggested earlier) "government", each of which is a synchronically transparent /n/ across a morpheme boundary, yet a cursory survey of recorded English speech suggests that it's pretty common for these tongue gesture associated with /n/ to be absent—infamously, the second syllable of the last routinely loses its coda altogether. This occurs across a transparent morpheme boundary, even with affixes productive in the modern language, even in learned usage.

English does have a lot more wrenches to throw in this, like producing nuclear nasals in a range of situations and not always assimilating across prosodic word boundaries—heck, it probably goes both ways in an utterance like "in my main menu". Words spelled "mp" are reliably [mp] in the modern language, but it's not a simple case as "mp" spelling /mp/ read [mp] and "np" spelling /np/ read [np]; English phonotactics also coerces the nasal in /np/ to a bilabial realization.

> because a bilabial stop doesn't use the tongue and so [n] is easily coarticulated

That doesn't sound quite right—this assimilation surely wouldn't be nearly as globally prevalent as it actually is if that were true.

Try it. While you'd think from the descriptions that a bilabial stop shouldn't care where the tongue goes, I think you'll find it quite challenging to coarticulate [n] with [b]—tongue positioning at lower teeth is pretty obligatory—and much easier to sequence them or produce [mb].

Clearly you can see the unnaturalness of lack of assimilation to call the attempt to do so "special effort"! So of course, the typical anglophone is not going to try to realize [n.p], they'll just see the <np> and read [mp] because that's what they would with any other internal /np/.

> So again - what would justify representing the Japanese sound as "n" regardless of context in languages where, unlike in Japanese, the distinction between "n" and "m" is meaningful?

Now, this gets to an entirely different issue: the purpose of the transcription. You seem convinced that the main goal of romanization is to provide a pronunciation guide for anglophones. But in the context of discussing a niche musical genre on the internet, that's not necessarily a high priority in the first place; you might care more about, say, searchability: we're looking for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denpa, not https://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/debt-toolkit/dempa.

And in a wider context, the principal users of romaji Japanese aren't anglophones; they're Japanese-speakers who for some or other reason need need to coerce Japanese text into an ~ASCII-subset representation, targeting primarily computer systems with that sort of limitation (most common case being keyboards via IME, hold that thought) and secondarily other people who can read Japanese; and naturally they make the distinctions Japanese makes and largely don't make the distinctions Japanese doesn't make. So unless backed by a marketing department, they tend to produce n (or nn as needed) for ん, because they have a tenuous grasp on how anglos spell [mp] in the first place and でmぱ is garbage that their IME won't convert into the right word, so why type that?

(This is also why pinyin can be the way it is, yet their IMEs have routinely have modes to ignore s-sh/n-ng/n-l distinctions.)