[Theofrastus]

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 recommendation also adopts Hepburn spellings for し, じ and つ as shi, ji, and tsu, compared to the Kunrei spellings of si, zi and tu.

I could imagine si, zi and tu sound closer to the spoken sounds to Mandarin speakers.

[retrac]

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]

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.

[mcmoor]

This is the same reason why I'm disappointed that Pinyin won over Wade-Giles. If Hepburn can be acknowledged to be better than Kurei-Shiki, then Wade-Giles is also better than Pinyin. At the very least we'll no longer have to deal with words containing q that's pronounced nowhere near q. Although admittedly it does produce some exotic looking words and boon for Scrabble players.

[mytailorisrich]

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

[jinushaun]

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

[JuniperMesos]

"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.

[shiroiuma]

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.

[decimalenough]

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.

[xigoi]

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

[ronsor]

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.

[xigoi]

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

[SpecialistK]

Others in the thread have suggested that Hepburn works quite well for German and other European languages (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46286292#46286611)

But it's a reality that English is the primary (if not sole) focus, for historical reasons and as the global lingua franca. English is taught (poorly, from what I hear) in schools, played on train announcements, is the only Western language available on ticket machines, and is the assumed language of non-Asian visitors to the country. I was even on a couple of domestic flights a few days ago and the captain / FAs made announcements in English. It is not "arbitrary" at all.

[rdtsc]

> 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?

[soraminazuki]

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.

[xigoi]

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”.

[lostlogin]

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

[QuercusMax]

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.

[stickfigure]

> “Bonzhoor” instead of “Bonjour”

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

[wewtyflakes]

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

[QuercusMax]

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]

> 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.

[devnullbrain]

>English

Use *h₂enǵʰ-ish please.

[naniwaduni]

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

[Theofrastus]

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

[ranger_danger]

> 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.

[tkgally]

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.

[z2]

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]

Not exactly. In the Wade–Giles system:

xi → hsi ji → chi ci → tz'u

[wyan]

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

[mono442]

It works better with other European languages' orthography too.

[Theofrastus]

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

[usrnm]

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

[fennecfoxy]

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.

[shikon7]

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?