With the continuing rise in popularity of Japanese animation
and comics in western countries, an unprecedented number of viewers
and readers are being exposed, in an indirect manner at least, to the
society, culture and language of Japan. The most die-hard fans of anime
and manga, the Japanese terms for, respectively, animation
and comic books, often go to the extent of learning the basics of the
Japanese language, but even the casual viewer of English-dubbed, Saturday
morning television anime will encounter words and names of Japanese
origin. Naturally, these words need to be written in a way that viewers
and readers unfamiliar with the Japanese language can understand.
The process of converting Japanese writing into an equivalent
that can be understood and pronounced by English-speaking readers is
referred to as romanization, after the Roman alphabet
(A, B, C, etc.). Conveying the pronunciation of a word when it is transliterated
is often tricky because the source and target languages can have different
rules for how each character or combination of characters must be pronounced,
and either language may contain sounds that the other does not. The
problem is compounded further if the two languages use different writing
systems, and given that English is rife with ambiguity over pronunciation
(even the same groups of letters can have several different pronunciations)
it is no surprise that the issue of romanizing Japanese has become so
complicated.
The Japanese Writing System
Before discussing romanization, it is best to first
be aware of the Japanese writing systems. The Roman alphabet (rômaji)
is used to some extent in Japan, often for packaging, brand names on
products, addresses on envelopes, etc., but the vast majority of modern
Japanese text is written using a combination of three writing systems,
kanji, hiragana and katakana.
Adopted from the writing system used in Chinese, kanji
represent words as symbols or groups of symbols, sometimes referred
to as "ideograms". There are over 6,000 individual kanji,
although only around 2-3,000 of them are in common usage, and it is
possible to get by on a set of 1,945 'everyday' kanji (the jôyô
kanji).
Hiragana is one of the two Japanese "kana";
a syllabic writing system (i.e. based on individual syllables). There
are just 46 [1] basic characters along
with rules for accenting and character combination. Katakana, the other
kana system, is very similar to hiragana, again using 46 basic characters
and much the same rules for writing, but the characters are different
in appearance. The katakana characters are typically used for writing
gairaigo - words that have been borrowed from other languages.
This includes the names of foreign countries, cities, etc., new or borrowed
words (such as "computer", "ice-cream", etc.) and
non-Japanese names.
Since all the sounds of spoken Japanese can be represented
using the hiragana character set, the examples in this article deal
mostly with hiragana. Words written with katakana or kanji use the same
sounds when spoken, so for the purposes of this article can be largely
disregarded.
Figure 1: The 46 basic hiragana characters.
From this basic kana set, other sounds
can be constructed. Twenty of the basic kana can be accented, adding
two small strokes (nigori) to the upper right corner of
the character to change their sound. For example, when accented "ka"
( 
) becomes "ga"
( 
). A further
five of these can be accented in a similar manner using a small circle
- "ha" (
),
for example, becomes "pa" ( 
). The individual kana can also be combined to produce new sounds (compound
syllables). For example, the syllable "ryo" would be produced
by combining "ri" and "yo" thus - 
- with the second kana appearing smaller to indicate their combination.
In addition, double consonant sounds, such as in the word setta,
can be represented using a small "tsu" kana - 
.
A small "tsu" may also be found at the end of a word or sentence
to indicate a glottal stop (a sharp ending, essentially a sort of verbal
exclamation mark). Glottal stops are not romanized. Finally, long vowel
sounds in katakana are represented by adding another vowel kana (one
of the five in the first column in figure 1). A long vowel sound, as
the name suggests, is where the speaker holds the vowel for double its
usual length. Romanizing long vowel sounds is an area that invites much
debate, and is dealt with in greater depth in part two of this article.
