[jinushaun]

Politics aside, Hepburn is better. You can’t seriously say you prefer “konniti-ha” and “susi-wo tabemasu”

[JuniperMesos]

"Better" depends on what you care about. _konniti-wa_ (which is the Kunrei-siki romanization of こんにちは, _konniti-ha_ is Nihon-shiki form that preserves the irregular use of は as topic-marking /wa/) and _susi-o_ (again, Kunrei-siki ignores a native script orthographic irregularity and romanizes を as _o_ not _wo_ ) are more consistent with the native phonological system of Japanese. In Japanese coronal consonants like /t/ and /s/ are regularly palatalized to /tS/ and /S/ before the vowel /i/, and there's no reason to treat _chi_ and _ti_ as meaningfully different sequences of sounds. Linguists writing about Japanese phonology use it instead of Hepburn for good reason.

Obviously, being more transparent to English-readers is also a reasonable goal a romanization system might have, and if that's your goal the Hepburn is a better system. I don't have a strong opinion about which system the Japanese government should treat as official, and realistically neither one is going to go away. But it's simply not the case that Hepburn is a better romanization scheme for every purpose.

[shiroiuma]

I don't see how kunrei-shiki is useful at all. If I want to write Japanese words so non-Japanese speakers can pronounce them approximately, then Hepburn is the way to go. If I want to write Japanese words so Japanese speakers can read them best, I'll write them in actual Japanese. This isn't 1975, and computers are perfectly able to render hiragana, katakana, and kanji. What do I need kunrei-shiki for? I've been living in Japan for years now, and have never found a use for it.

[xigoi]

Should we also change other languages’ orthographies to make them easier to pronounce for English speakers? “Bonzhoor” instead of “Bonjour”?

[ronsor]

Japanese people don't read romanized Japanese. Even Japanese learners don't read romanized Japanese.

Romanization is, by and large, a thing that exists for people who already know European/Western languages.

[rdtsc]

> Should we also change other languages’ orthographies to make them easier to pronounce for English speakers? “Bonzhoor” instead of “Bonjour”?

Already done.

- Komen ça va? - Mo byin, mærsi.

We don't have anything against https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Creole, do we?

[soraminazuki]

Do you think Japanese people actually read and write in kunrei-shiki? No, they write using their own letters.

Romanization is an approximation that exists primarily for two purposes: 1. to express Japanese terms in other languages and 2. to enable typing Japanese on a computer. It’s silly to enforce kunrei-shiki, a system rarely used in practice, in the name of "accuracy" based on arbitrary criteria. Romanized spellings will never be accurate for obvious reasons.

Given the purpose of romanization, it’s more practical to choose a system that allows non-Japanese speakers to pronounce words more closely aligned with the correct pronunciation.

[lostlogin]

We could start by standardising English, so that pronunciation was always the same for a given letter order.

[QuercusMax]

If French didn't use the Roman alphabet natively, you might have a point.

At some point you might as well use Roman characters the way the Cherokee alphabet does - which is to say, uses some of the shapes without paying attention to what sounds they made in English.

[stickfigure]

> “Bonzhoor” instead of “Bonjour”

English is already heavily Norman-ized. Half of our vocabulary - including the word pronounce - comes from French.

[wewtyflakes]

English is the top language spoken in all the world; it would be lovely to facilitate better communication with that population.

[devnullbrain]

>English

Use *h₂enǵʰ-ish please.

[naniwaduni]

You are very, very likely to find people who prefer "sushi wo tabemasu", because standards are great.