Joou-sama no Eshi

[sholum]

@trapsarebetter

Well, it isn't in Japanese either except with /s/; this notation arouses the impression that it should be geminated which is not how it's pronounced in Japanese, an apostrophe such as <tyo'to ma'te> could also work.
It arouses the impression that Japanese has actual geminated consonants such as, say, Finnish; this is even a popular myth amongst phonologists and they are often described as such.

Huh. I actually got the idea that it was gemination from looking it up. I remember hearing it described as a glottal stop before, but that doesn't seem to fit either.

I think that might be influenced by your perception that is influenced by Hepburn. I very frequently see English speakers make mispronunciations that seem to arise from Hepburn such as pronouncing “全部” as “zenbu”, not as “dzembu”. Another common thing is the situation with <fu> — Japanese speakers will universally say that if one can't make the proper sound in between [ h] and [f], then simply using an [ h] is far præferred.

Considering the vowels make up more than half of the sounds spoken in the language... I'm assuming that first sentence is in reference to something else?
I personally don't mind using 'hu' for ふ. As you said, it's the better choice. I do tend to write 'fu' though, just because I'm used to it.

I disagree, the /z/ is mispronounced almost always and English speakers don't seem to realize that the neutral pronunciation is [dz], and [z] is a variant that almost only occurs after a vowel — it is better to always use [dz] than never.

Sure, but I see that as introducing additional problems that outweigh the minor correction it provides. If you go around using 'zenbu', you'll be understandable, albeit with an accent; if you go around saying 'duzenbu', on the other hand...

Is it less to remember? I believe I've adequately demonstrated that <tya> and <sya> are closer to the actual sound than <cha> and <sha>, though it's not as if it can ever lead to communication problems as I doubt that JApanese speakers could even hear the difference between “tues” and “choose” and “suit” and “shoot”.

Even knowing exactly what they're supposed to represent, every time I see <tya> and <sya>, I recognize them as 'tee-ya' and 'see-ya'. Maybe I'm the only native English speaker that would see them that way, but I have a hard time believing that, since this is the same kind of transformation that happens to 'kyo' and 'ryu'.

Then are you also opposed to “Muḫammad” rather than “Mohammed”? I think it's more meaningful to convey structure since they'll completely mispronounce it anyway, no matter what one do.

If one wish to convey pronunciation, one should use i.p.a..

Not knowing a lick of Arabic, the answer is yes, I prefer it spelled as Mohammed (other spellings are fine), because I don't have to learn how to input "ḫa" for this single name.
In fact, I think this is a good example for our conversation, because I don't know Arabic, have zero interest in learning it, and have zero interest in the culture that propagated the name Mohammed into my region. The name “Muḫammad” would be my only encounter with this method of romanization. Being a complete outsider on this example, I wouldn't want to deal with "ḫa" showing up. How the heck do I read that differently to 'ha'? No idea, so I'm just going to read it as 'ha', but I still don't know how to type it, so I'll just type "Muhammed". Heck, if it weren't such a common name that I already have a bit of an idea how to pronounce it, I might just read it as 'Moo-ham-edd'.

See it thus: Certainly we can agree that there is merit for a unified global standard of romanized Japanese. It would be annoying if the same name were romanized differently depending on target language, which is actually what happens at times, for instance “Vladimir Putin” is traditionally romanized as “Poetin” in Dutch.

No, I don't necessarily agree.
In the case of Japanese, I think its easy enough to create a romanization system that is relatively straight-forward for a speaker of any European language (that uses a Latin-based writing system) to understand, so I don't know that it'd really make a difference in this case. But if it did make more sense to use a different system in a different language, then I don't see any reason not to.

To step away from Japanese for a bit, I'll use an example of a name from a neighborly Germanic language: Icelandic.
Looking through the Wikipedia articles for Hafthor Bjornnson (the English transliteration, of course):
Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson (original Icelandic)
ハフソー・ユリウス・ビョルンソン (Japanese transliteration)
Hafthor Julius Björnsson (German transliteration)
Хафтор Юлиус Бьёрнссон (Russian transliteration)
Being Wikipedia, most of the articles use his name as originally spelt, some of the other languages reference the English transliteration, the French, Italian, and Spanish versions don't use a transliteration (because Wikipedia, I imagine; I have a hard time believing that French fans of strongman are typing Hafþór while they're searching for a shred of hope that he's not retiring).

The biggest thing to note is that it is the parts that aren't part of the local language that are changed. In the case of Russian and Japanese, this means everything is replaced with Cyrillic and katakana respectively. For German, the accents on the vowels and the 'þ' are modified, but the ö remains, because it's part of German writing. Of course, in English, that goes away too.

So even with a language that isn't as remote as Japanese, we get multiple transliterations that fit the target language better. The ones that don't use the original or create their own transliteration use the English version.

By the way, with your example of Putin: the Germans write Wladimir; the French write Poutine. There were several other differences between languages. It's what makes sense in their languages.

I'm still not sold on the merit of communicating pronunciation since they mispronounce it anyway. I very commonly see the “e” in “Shinzo Abe” being silent, as if it were “Ape” but with a [ b] — so one might as well simply write “Sinzou Abe”.

In the case of Abe, I think it has more to do with the common shortening of Abraham into Abe. Since "Abe" is already recognized as a name, it doesn't even get a chance to be interpreted as 'a-be'.
I don't agree with your conclusion here. "Combustion engines are only about 40% efficient, so we might as well just use bicycles" is equally absurd by my reasoning. Limited utility is still some utility; discarding the premise and goal of creating a certain kind of utility and making something different instead leaves the former demand unfulfilled.

I'm not at all so convinced that English speakers when hearing “し“ and “じ” hear “shi” and “ji” when not primed for it — I've seen various examples when they not be primed that suggest they simply hear “si” and “(d)zi”.

Possibly. But how do you test this without priming them? The first thing that pops into my mind is multiple choice, but just seeing the choices would prime subjects as they tried to match what they heard to one of the choices. Asking them to transcribe what they hear wouldn't provide good data at small scales (I suspect you'd need thousands of valid responses to pull the best candidate) because there is that level of subjectivity that you pointed out with Hepburn's interpretations.

There's also the reality that people don't easily identify sounds that they're not used to.

 

[Neushaartje]

@sholum

Huh. I actually got the idea that it was gemination from looking it up. I remember hearing it described as a glottal stop before, but that doesn't seem to fit either.

Yes, I know; it's a very common misconception that one will even find in linguistics books on the matter that it is geminated simply because it seems very intuitive and it can sound like that easily to a human ear:

You can see the waveforms and spectrograms of respectively a Japanese speaker pronouncing “ちょっと” and a Finnish speaker pronouncing “että” here. Notice that in the bottom one there is an amplitude peak, as well as a thin, intense dark vertical line in the spectrogram that repræsents the first “t” that is absent in Japanese.

How っ, the moraic obstruent /Q/ is realized in Japanese is that it's simply realized as silence before /p, k, t/ and as indeed a gemination of /s/, at least for the most part in the Tokyo standard dialect. You are correct in that it sometimes also is realized as a glottal stop; it's an Archiphone with a highly variable realization which is why some phonologists don't even recognize it as a phoneme as it is as far as I know unique to Japonic languages, and no other language family has something similar.

Some other dialects of Japanese even permit /Q/ in very different places, where it typically is realized as a glottal stop.

Considering the vowels make up more than half of the sounds spoken in the language... I'm assuming that first sentence is in reference to something else?

Well, vowels are something they do correctly more often; not pronouncing /z/ as [dz] is a more obscure mistake.

Even knowing exactly what they're supposed to represent, every time I see <tya> and <sya>, I recognize them as 'tee-ya' and 'see-ya'. Maybe I'm the only native English speaker that would see them that way, but I have a hard time believing that, since this is the same kind of transformation that happens to 'kyo' and 'ryu'.

I don't disagree with you, but as you said the same problem arises in <kyo> as well. I suppose that I am used to the EnPr phonetic transcription scheme of English, an alternative orthography that writes English completely phonemically where <ty> is common and “tuesday” would be written as “tyoozdā”.

Not knowing a lick of Arabic, the answer is yes, I prefer it spelled as Mohammed (other spellings are fine), because I don't have to learn how to input "ḫa" for this single name.

It should be noted that in Arabic, h, ḫ, and ḥ are all diffeent sounds, and <ḥ> is sometimes also written as kh in transcription.

In fact, I think this is a good example for our conversation, because I don't know Arabic, have zero interest in learning it, and have zero interest in the culture that propagated the name Mohammed into my region. The name “Muḫammad” would be my only encounter with this method of romanization. Being a complete outsider on this example, I wouldn't want to deal with "ḫa" showing up. How the heck do I read that differently to 'ha'? No idea, so I'm just going to read it as 'ha', but I still don't know how to type it, so I'll just type "Muhammed". Heck, if it weren't such a common name that I already have a bit of an idea how to pronounce it, I might just read it as 'Moo-ham-edd'.

So how do you suggest the vowel issue be solved then in Japanese? Hepburn specifically chooses a macron because doubles vowels would be pronounced improperly and English speakers are not generally accustomed to the idea of pronouncing successive vowels, be they identical or not, sans any hiatus as is typically done in Japanese.?

In the case of Japanese, I think its easy enough to create a romanization system that is relatively straight-forward for a speaker of any European language (that uses a Latin-based writing system) to understand, so I don't know that it'd really make a difference in this case. But if it did make more sense to use a different system in a different language, then I don't see any reason not to.

Well, my native language, Dutch, like British English contrasts /tj/ “tube” from /č/ “choose”, and probably does so even more pronouncedly. This might also be why to my ear, the Japanese sound in <ちゅ> is quite clearly “ty” and not “ch”. It is my understanding now that this contrast is not as pronounced in North American English so it might not be as clear to them, clearly there is a suitability concern here.

By the way, with your example of Putin: the Germans write Wladimir; the French write Poutine. There were several other differences between languages. It's what makes sense in their languages.

And I don't think that's a very good idea; consider that for languages that are already written in the Latin alphabet the name is typically not adjusted either. “Charles du Galle” is simply written as such in English, even though the pronunciation would not be what one expects; this is also the same for loanwords and phrases such as “gesundheit”, which is not pronounced as the orthography would indicate to an English speaker.

In the case of Abe, I think it has more to do with the common shortening of Abraham into Abe. Since "Abe" is already recognized as a name, it doesn't even get a chance to be interpreted as 'a-be'.

Is that so? I find this to happen even where this isn't the case, such as “Tokyo” as we already mentioned. The names of many loans from Japanese are mispronounced by spelling pronunciations.

Possibly. But how do you test this without priming them?

Let English speakers with no foreknowledge of Japanese listen to these words, and have them write down what they think they hear in EnPr after being taught EnPR.

Consider what Hepburn writes as “dōshite”, do you really believe that any English speaker would write down what the spelling suggests? I thnk they woild hear “dōste”? I am 100% certain that no English speaker will hear an “i” in how the word is commonly pronounced, and I am 95% certain that hearing “sh” instead of “s” is rare — he will most likely hear “s”.

 

[iskelets8]

I seem to have stumbled into a board meeting

 

[Gimmetimmy]

What

 

[NadimM]

Can someone explain the ending to me?
Did Sarina and Reika do it despite Sarina saying she loves the MC? Also why did the MC shift from Fujimaki to Miyaji? It felt like I missed something.

 

[SuperZeaxe]

Read the whole thing in about 4 hours total (cause of work and shit) kept me entertained and wanting more although I was confused by the love situation since I'm a bit of a dolt. I lived the story and though the art was mediocre I feel that it got better as the story progresses. It also showed me how some stories are made which was nice. Overall 7/10 would I read it again? Probably.

 

[CiceroCiceronis]

Not sure why this one is rated so poorly. I don't think it has any major deeper meaning, but all the characters are fun, there are some good gags, decent plot progression especially with regards to

Spoiler

Miyaji returning to his dreams of becoming a mangaka

... it's not perfect but it was engaging, definitely more than a 6 (especially by this site's general standards!).