Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Hepburn romanization generally follows English phonology with Romance vowels. It is an intuitive method of showing Anglophones the pronunciation of a word in Japanese. It was standardized in the United States as American National Standard System for the Romanization of Japanese (Modified Hepburn), but that status was abolished on October 6 ...
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.
Wāpuro-style romanizations are also frequently used by native speakers of Japanese in informal contexts, as well as by many fans of anime and other aspects of Japanese culture [citation needed]. A common characteristic of these (often online) cases is the avoidance of hard-to-type circumflexes or macrons.
As an example, consider the Japanese martial art 柔術: the Nihon-shiki romanization zyûzyutu may allow someone who knows Japanese to reconstruct the kana syllables じゅうじゅつ, but most native English speakers, or rather readers, would find it easier to guess the pronunciation from the Hepburn version, jūjutsu.
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.
Nihon-shiki (Japanese: 日本式ローマ字, lit. 'Japan-style', romanized as Nihonsiki in the system itself) is a romanization system for transliterating the Japanese language into the Latin alphabet. Among the major romanization systems for Japanese, it is the most regular one and has an almost one-to-one relation to the kana writing system.
Kunrei-shiki romanization (Japanese: 訓令式ローマ字, Hepburn: Kunrei-shiki rōmaji), also known as the Monbusho system (named after the endonym for the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) or MEXT system, [1] is the Cabinet-ordered romanization system for transcribing the Japanese language into the Latin alphabet.
Existing schemes for the romanization of Japanese either are based on the systematic nature of the script, e.g. nihon-shiki チ ti, or they apply some Western graphotactics, usually the English one, to the common Japanese pronunciation of the kana signs, e.g. Hepburn-shiki チ chi.