Romanization of Japanese
Romanized Japanese may be used in any context where Japanese text is targeted at non-Japanese speakers who cannot read kanji or kana, such as for names on street signs and passports and in dictionaries and textbooks for foreign learners of the language.
It is also used to transliterate Japanese terms in text written in English (or other languages that use the Latin script) on topics related to Japan, such as linguistics, literature, history, and culture.
[2][citation needed] Jesuit priests used the system in a series of printed Catholic books so that missionaries could preach and teach their converts without learning to read Japanese orthography.
For example, Lafcadio Hearn's book Kwaidan shows the older kw- pronunciation; in modern Hepburn romanization, this would be written Kaidan (lit.
Today, the use of Nihon-shiki for writing Japanese is advocated by the Oomoto sect[3] and some independent organizations.
For example, the name じゅんいちろう is written with the kana characters ju-n-i-chi-ro-u, and romanized as Jun'ichirō in Revised Hepburn.
Nihon-shiki romanization was originally invented as a method for Japanese to write their own language in Latin characters, rather than to transcribe it for Westerners as Hepburn was.
Kunrei-shiki romanization is a slightly modified version of Nihon-shiki which eliminates differences between the kana syllabary and modern pronunciation.
For example, the characters づ and ず are pronounced identically in modern Japanese, and thus Kunrei-shiki and Hepburn ignore the difference in kana and represent the sound in the same way (zu).
Kunrei-shiki is taught to Japanese elementary school students in their fourth year of education.
It is possible to elaborate these romanizations to enable non-native speakers to pronounce Japanese words more correctly.
Typical additions include tone marks to note the Japanese pitch accent and diacritic marks to distinguish phonological changes, such as the assimilation of the moraic nasal /ɴ/ (see Japanese phonology).
A common practice is to romanize づ as dzu, allowing to distinguish it from both ドゥ du and ず zu.
Despite the International Phonetic Alphabet, the /j/ sound in や, ゆ, and よ are never romanized with the letter J. 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.
There is no universally accepted style of romanization for the smaller versions of the vowels and y-row kana when used outside the normal combinations (きゃ, きょ, ファ etc.
[citation needed] The list below shows the Japanese readings of letters in Katakana, for spelling out words, or in acronyms.
