I was looking up the rules for writing with nihonsiki romanization and it says that you should write long vowels with ^, but does it include just えい and おう sequences as in 永遠 and 往来? Or does it include other long vowels like the ones in いい, ううん and 炎? And if it does, are words like 言い’s reading considered a long vowel? I mean, in 思う the last syllable isn’t considered part of a long O, even if in the case of 言い the pronunciation doesn’t change, is it right to consider it a long vowel? And lastly, what happens in the case of words that make a sequence of two same vowels between two different readings like in 把握?
I know it’s a lot of questions, but they really puzzle me. Thanks in advance!
6 comments
wikipedia:
> the standard does not mandate the precise spellings needed to distinguish ô 王/おう, ou 追う/おう and oo 大/おお
Sounds like it doesn’t necessarily distinguish them although you can do it if you want to.
honestly don’t worry too much about the details of romanization systems, they’re not what you should be using to read the language after all. this one isn’t used very often anyway.
romaji is not an accurate representation of japanese, it’s a shortcut to be able to communicate a hypersimplistic limited subset of it to those that can’t read the kana
just learn your kana, move on past romaji, and don’t worry about it, romaji isn’t japanese and it will never become it
I write ii as ii and ou as ou. I don’t know how to type ō from keyboard.
What I do know is that if a “u” is a verb ending, it would never be shown as a long vowel. So 通う (kayou) would never be “kayō”.
With that said, I’d guess that around 90% of people would use the Hepburn system of romanization when writing romaji, and that does have variations, depending on your own preference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepburn_romanization?wprov=sfla1
Personally, I type out each letter as it would appear as kana (except for the particles は、を、へ), which I generally write as “wa, o, e”. So I’d write Tokyo とうきょう as “Toukyou”. Though it would be rare for me to do so, as I’d usually type the word and transform it into full Japanese kanji (東京) or else call it “Tokyo” in English.
Love the comments that are like “just learn kana”, as if…
A. … OP doesn’t know kana.
B. … you never need romanization again after you’ve learned kana.
C. … a total beginner would be likely to use Nihonsiki of all romanization systems.
My native is Hungarian so I often use the commas: kókó for example