A palindrome is a word or phrase that reads the same backwards as forward such as ROTATOR.
I am looking for Japanese ones but in Rōmaji, the latin script of Japanese words.
The Rōmaji translation for god e.g. would be Kami.
Is there a list of what I am searching or do you know such palindromes?
Thanks in advance!
3 comments
If you want a palindrome with more than 3 letters in romaji it is very difficult because Japanese characters are all consonant/ vowel combinations with exception of a,i,u,e,o and n. This makes it easy to make three character palindromes like awa, ubu, imi, etc. but difficult for anything longer than 3 letters as no word can end in a consonant other than “n” which is limiting. Keep in mind Japanese don’t see words constructed of individual romaji letters but instead of characters made of consonant / vowel combos, so kamikaze is 4 characters long (カミカゼ) or two kanji (神風）
Yeah in the example you gave, kami, a Japanese speaker would conceptually break the word down into its kana characters, so か(ka) み(mi). Which means that the “palindrome” version of that would be reversing the two characters into みか (mika).
https://www.sljfaq.org/afaq/palindromes.html