Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dragonwriter 184 days 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.
1 comments
QuercusMax 184 days ago
Sure, but the point is this isn't really making romanized Japanese more English-like. It's making it more similar to how just about every other language already uses the Roman alphabet. This isn't an Anglo-centric thing, it's just good common sense - unless your goal is to make it harder to pronounce your language properly, which seems like an obvious own-goal.
link
AndriyKunitsyn 184 days ago
About 30% of people worldwide use a language that's not written in Roman alphabet.

Additionally, being written in Roman alphabet doesn't neccessarily mean it's clear how to pronounce it. Hungarians calls their country "Magyarország", but unless you know Hungarian, you will be surprised with how it's pronounced. Same as "Chenonceaux", "Tekirdağ" or "Crkvina".

link
QuercusMax 184 days ago
Those are especially pathological cases, and not especially relevant to this discussion, as the romanization rules are explicitly designed to be consistent.
link
AndriyKunitsyn 182 days ago
Okay, I misread the context of the discussion. I apologize.
link
tmtvl 183 days ago
Worcestershire.
link
QuercusMax 183 days ago
We're not talking about words like worcestershire. I'm talking about words like "bat" "monkey" "chimichanga". Those that follow the rules. There can't possibly be irregular spellings using the romanizations we're talking about!
link
dragonwriter 184 days ago
> It's making it more similar to how just about every other language already uses the Roman alphabet.

There is no way "every other language already uses the Roman alphabet."

Many languages are internally consistent in how they use it, but those that are aren't consistent with each other. And then there is English, which does pretty much everything any other language which uses the Roman alphabet does somewhere, and probably a few that none of the other extant languages normally using that alphabet do with it, on top.

link