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The following notes
below are from Wikepedia on
Japanese
Romanisation.
The romanization of Japanese is the use of the Latin alphabet (called romaji
(«í«Þí®) in Japanese) to write the Japanese language, which is normally written in
logographic characters borrowed from Chinese (kanji) and syllabic scripts
(kana). This is done in any context where Japanese text is targeted at those who
do not know the language: For example, for names on street signs, passports, and
in dictionaries and textbooks for foreign learners of the language. The word "romaji"
is sometimes incorrectly transliterated as romanji or romanji (note the "n"
before the "j").
There are a number of different romanization systems. The three main ones are
Hepburn romanization, Kunrei-shiki Romaji (ISO 3602), and Nihon-shiki Romaji
(ISO 3602 Strict). Variants of Hepburn are the most widely used.
All Japanese who have attended elementary school since World War II have been
taught to read and write romanized Japanese. Romanization is also the most
common way to input Japanese into word processors and computers. Therefore,
almost all Japanese are able to read and write Japanese using romaji. The
primary usage of romaji is on computers and other electronic devices that for
whatever reason do not support the display or input of Japanese characters, in
educational materials for foreigners, and in academic papers in English written
on the topic of Japanese (i.e. linguistics or literature).
History
The earliest Japanese romanization system was based on the orthography of
Portuguese. It was developed around 1548 by a Japanese Catholic named Yajiro.
Jesuit presses used the system in a series of printed Catholic books so that
missionaries could preach and teach their converts without learning to read
Japanese ideographs. The most useful of these books for the study of early
modern Japanese pronunciation and early attempts at romanization was the Nippo
jisho, a Japanese-Portuguese dictionary written in 1603.
The first system to
be developed was the Hepburn system, developed for James Curtis Hepburn's
dictionary of Japanese words and intended for foreigners to use. In the Meiji
era, some Japanese scholars advocated abolishing the Japanese writing system
entirely and using romaji in its stead. The Nihon shiki romanization was an
outgrowth of this movement. Several Japanese texts were published entirely in
romaji during this period, but it failed to catch on, perhaps because of the
large number of homophones in Japanese, which are pronounced similarly but
written in different characters. Later, in the early 20th century, some scholars
devised syllabary systems with characters derived from Latin; these were even
less popular, because they were not based on any historical use of the Latin
alphabet.
The Modern System
The Revised Hepburn System of Romanization uses a macron to indicate some long
vowels, and an apostrophe to note the separation of easily confused phonemes.
For example, the name ª¸ªåªóª¤ªÁªíª¦, is written with the kana characters
ju-n-i-chi-ro-u, and romanized as Jun'ichiro in Revised Hepburn. This system is
widely used in Japan and among foreign students and academics.
Hepburn romanization generally follows English phonology with Romance vowels,
and is an intuitive method of showing Anglophones the pronunciation of a word in
Japanese. It was standardized in the USA as American National Standard System
for the Romanization of Japanese (Modified Hepburn), but this status was
abolished on October 6, 1994. Hepburn is the most common romanization system in
use today, especially in the English-speaking world. The Hepburn system has been
criticized because its distortion of the Japanese phonology can make it harder
to teach Japanese to non-natives.
*For more information
and some useful tables containing the pronunciation of all Japanese letters in
terms of English approximations see the
Japanese
Romanisation section of Wikipedia.
