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Japanese is written without spaces between words, and in some cases, such as compounds, it may not be completely clear where word boundaries should lie, resulting in varying romanization styles. For example, 結婚する, meaning "to marry", and composed of the noun 結婚 (kekkon, "marriage") combined with する (suru, "to do"), is romanized ...
For example, in standard Japanese the kana おう can be pronounced in two different ways: as /oː/ meaning "king" (王), [2] and as /oɯ/ meaning "to chase" (追う). [3] Kunrei and Hepburn spell the two differently as ô / ō and ou , because the former is a long vowel while the latter has an o that happens to be followed by a u ; however ...
In linguistics, romanization is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration , for representing written text, and transcription , for representing the spoken word, and combinations of both.
Although Kunrei-shiki romanization is the style favored by the Japanese government, Hepburn remains the most popular method of Japanese romanization. It is learned by most foreign students of the language, and is used within Japan for romanizing personal names, locations, and other information, such as train tables and road signs.
Readers of English occasionally encounter words romanized according to historical kana usage. Here are some examples, with modern romanizations in parentheses: Kwannon : A Bodhisattva; Kwaidan (Kaidan), meaning ghost story, the title of a collection of Japanese ghost stories compiled by Lafcadio Hearn
し, in hiragana, or シ in katakana, is one of the Japanese kana, which each represent one mora. Both represent the phonemes /si/, reflected in the Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki romanization si, although for phonological reasons, the actual pronunciation is ⓘ, which is reflected in the Hepburn romanization shi. The shapes of these kana have ...
James Curtis Hepburn (/ ˈ h ɛ p b ər n /; March 13, 1815 – September 21, 1911) was an American physician, educator, translator and lay Christian missionary.He is known for the Hepburn romanization system for transliteration of the Japanese language into the Latin alphabet, which he popularized in his Japanese–English dictionary.
For example, き (ki) plus ゃ (small ya) becomes きゃ (kya). Addition of the small y kana is called yōon. A small tsu っ, called a sokuon, indicates that the following consonant is geminated (doubled). In Japanese this is an important distinction in pronunciation; for example, compare さか, saka, "hill" with さっか, sakka, "author".