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The Hepburn romanization system (ヘボン式, Hebon-shiki) was devised by an
American missionary doctor in the 1860s to transcribe the sounds of the
Japanese language into the Roman alphabet (in Japanese, "Romaji").
It is widely used today both in the English-speaking world and in Japan,
where many younger people are most familiar with the Roman alphabet through
the study of English and thus find its spelling conventions more comfortable
than the official Monbusho romanization standard. Compared to the Kunrei (Monbusho)
system, it compromises with English phonography rather than adheres to
Japanese phonological system.
Salient features:
- Vowels are based on "continental" European values, as one might find
in Italian, and definitely unlike English: a, i, u, e, o
- Long vowels are marked with a macron
- The consonants are generally standard: k/g, s/z, t/d, n, h, b, p, m, y
(/j/), r, w, n' (syllabic n is n' before vowels, or n before consonants)
- Geminate consonants are marked by doubling the consonant
Where syllables constructed systematically according to the Japanese
syllabary contain the "wrong" consonant for the modern spoken language, the
orthography is changed to something that, as an English speaker would
pronounce it, better matches the real sound:
- し: si -> shi (/Si/)
- ち: ti -> chi (/tSi/)
- つ: tu -> tsu (/tsu/)
- じ: zi -> ji (/dZi/)
- ぢ: di -> ji (/dZi/)
- ふ: hu -> fu (/Fu/)
Similarly the -y- is removed in:
- しゃ, しゅ, しょ: sya, syu, syo -> sha, shu, sho
- ちゃ, ちゅ, ちょ: tya, tyu, tyo -> cha, chu, cho
- じゃ, じゅ, じょ: zya, zyu, zyo -> ja, ju, jo
- ぢゃ, ぢゅ, ぢょ: dya, dyu, dyo -> ja, ju, jo
Common variations of the Hepburn system often center around the long
vowels:
- Tokyo: Standard, marked by macrons.
- Tôkyô: Circumflexes may be used in place of macrons.
- Tokyo: Long vowels may not be indicated at all.
- Tookyoo: Long vowels may be doubled.
Toukyou: Long vowels may be written to replicate the hiragana spelling:
long o is usually ou, long e usually ei, the others are doubled.
This last method is sometimes called "wapuro" style, as this is how text
is entered into a word processor (wādo purosessā) for automatic conversion
to kana and kanji.
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