, romanized as in the system itself, is a

romanization In linguistics, romanization is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Latin script, Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, and tra ...

system for transliterating the

Japanese language is the principal language of the Japonic languages, Japonic language family spoken by the Japanese people. It has around 123 million speakers, primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language, and within the Japanese dia ...

into the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

. Among the major romanization systems for Japanese, it is the most regular one and has an almost one-to-one relation to the kana writing system.

History

It was invented by physicist Aikitsu Tanakadate (田中館愛橘) in 1885, with the intention to replace the Hepburn system of romanization. Tanakadate's intention was to replace the traditional

kanji are logographic Chinese characters, adapted from Chinese family of scripts, Chinese script, used in the writing of Japanese language, Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are ...

and kana system of writing Japanese completely by a romanized system, which he felt would make it easier for Japan to compete with Western countries. Since the system was intended for Japanese people to use to write their own language, it is much more regular than Hepburn romanization, and unlike Hepburn's system, it makes no effort to make itself easier to pronounce for English-speakers. Nihon-shiki was followed by Kunrei-shiki, which was adopted in 1937, after a political debate over whether Nihon-shiki or Hepburn-shiki should be used by the Japanese government. Kunrei-shiki is nearly identical to Nihon-shiki, but it merges syllable pairs di/zi ぢ/じ, du/zu づ/ず, dya/zya ぢゃ/じゃ, dyu/zyu ぢゅ/じゅ, dyo/zyo ぢょ/じょ, wi/i ゐ/い, we/e ゑ/え, kwa/ka くゎ/か, and gwa/ga ぐゎ/が, whose pronunciations in Modern Standard Japanese are now identical. For example, the word かなづかい, rendered ''kanadukai'' in Nihon-shiki, is pronounced as ''kanazukai'' in modern Japanese, and is romanized as such in Kunrei. The

International Organization for Standardization The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ; ; ) is an independent, non-governmental, international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries. M ...

has standardized Kunrei-shiki, under ISO 3602. The JSL system, which is intended for use instructing foreign students of Japanese, is also based on Nihon-shiki. However, some Japanese-speakers still distinguish di from zi and du from zu and so Nihon-shiki spelling is not entirely obsolete. Nihon-shiki is considered the most regular of the romanization systems for the Japanese language because it maintains a strict "one kana, two letters" form. Because it has unique forms corresponding to each of the respective pairs of ''kana'' homophones listed above, it is the only formal system of romanization that can allow (almost) lossless ("round trip") mapping, but 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.

Romanization charts

Notes

*Letters in red are obsolete in modern Japanese. *Even when ''he'' へ is used as a particle, it is written as ''he'', not ''e'' (Kunrei-shiki/Hepburn). *Even when ''ha'' は is used as a particle, it is written as ''ha'', not ''wa''. *Even when ''wo'' を is used as a particle, it is written as ''wo'', not ''o''. *Long vowels are indicated by a circumflex accent: long o is written ''ô'', unlike Hepburn, which uses a macron. *Syllabic n ん is written as ''n'' before consonants but as ''n'' before vowels and ''y''. * Geminate consonants are always marked by doubling the consonant following the sokuon (っ).

History

Romanization charts

Notes

See also

References

Sources

General references