掲示板 Forums - Vowel Erasure & Romanization

Is anybody else bothered/annoyed by how common it is (or seems to be) for entire vowel mora to just be *POOF*ed away by non-日本語 sources, especially in regards to romanization, and sometimes even so far as incorrect prounciations?

This drives me nuts, because not only is Japanese a wonderful and nuanced language, it is an EXTREMELY 'simple' (ie 'straightforward') language...

Each sound has its own character (ignoring historical sound shift overlaps like ぢじ & をお), each character has only one sound (ignoring the SSS-rarity abnormal kana readings for particles like へ as え), each character's sound has the same duration (excluding the effects of ッ & ー), and everything kana is '100%' phonetic...

Okay, well, each of those had a caveat, but 2/3 are the effects of linguistic history prior to standardization, so while those 2 may be a bit confusing for some (myself included), it is that final 1 that I am discussing here.

ッ seems to be generally shown its due respect, and treated with appropriate care in foreign pronunciatiom and romanized writing. Ex: 北海道(ほっかいどう) is correctly romanized and pronounced with the doubled 'k' consonant in "Hokkaido".

However, that example perfectly leads into the first half of my annoyance... WHERE DID THE う/ウ (from the end of 道) GO?!?! An entire vowel just got deleted out of nowhere, without any justification. The closing う in most multi-mora terms may be 'weak' (ie spoken in a 'falling'/'fading' intonation), but it absolutely still exists.

Japanese is so straightforward... each ほ kana っ character か directly い corresponds ど to う sound [yes, ほっかいどう was split up in that sentence on purpose, for dramatic effect]... And yet, WHERE ARE ALL THE うs & おs?!?!

If you read or romanize 裏(うら), you obviously keep the う. If you read or romanize 上(うえ), you obviously keep the う. If you read or romanize 王(おう) [ex: "maou" from 魔王], you obviously keep the う. So how...why...howhy...do people seem to think it is in any way accurate linguistically or respectful culturally to just outright delete entire EXTREMELY MEANINGFUL vowels from so many Japanese words?

党 is not と, or とお, or とー, it is とう. 王 is not お, or おお, or おー, it is おう. 像 is not ぞ, or ぞお, or ぞー, it is ぞう. ETC...

う =/= お =/= ー

う is 'u', お is 'o', and ー isn't even a sound unto itself. Yet, in romanization and many other non-Japanese linguistic matters, these 3 wholly-distinct things are treated as mutually-synonymous.

The central foundation of Japanese (and most, if not all, other languages) is 5 core vowels. Each vowel is 100% distinct from the other 4, with no overlap; were there any overlap, they could not function as the linguistic foundation. Despite this reality l, the Japanese う vowel seems to consistently just totally deleted from both romanization and non-Japanese prounciation (ex: IPA) whenever it is the closing mora of a term.

Ex: 東京(とうきょう) gets romanized as "Tokyo", totally deleting TWO うs from both the writing and the pronunciation. とうきょう has only 4 kana in it (counting きょ as 1 kana), which means that by ignoring the 2 うs, an absurd 50% of the of the word is deleted...half of the word, just...*POOF* into the vile abyss of infinite interlinguistic ineptitude. Thus とうきょう becomes brutally defiled into the totally distinct ときょ. 東 cannot be read as just と, neither can 京 be read as just きょ. The word is destroyed. Of the 4 main aspects of linguistics (writing, speaking, meaning, and usage), 3/4 have been totally ruined by this...the writing no longer reflects the correct term, the speaking based off the incorrect writing becomes equally incorrect, and the meaning is totally lost as the kanji are not used to represent such...all that remains is usage, the usage of 'that big city in Japan'. Oh joy...we retain so much of merit.

And, just in case this may omehow seem to be insignificant... 党 is とう, 遠 is とお, 都 is と, and yet all 3 would get romanized as just 'to' or the IPA equivalent of トー...making it unclear, to anyone not already aquainted with 日本語, that there even exists any difference between them, let alone a difference of such immense magnitude...and ignoring the fact that none of those could even be written as トー (or its IPA equivalent), since とお is 2 distinct full mora, while とー is 1 mora being 'stretched' to a 2 mora duration.

Okay...Rant over.

Can't think of an eloquent 'closing remark' at the moment, so instead...here's a cute 'lil squirrel. 🐿

Idk, I think it's a pretty natural linguistic process. It just reflects what's practical for any given language. It's not really about perfect phonetic accuracy. As far as I know, every language does this (including Japanese). Like... what's up with that - イギリス :D (apparently borrowed from either Dutch or Portuguese). Or how barely any language uses the native names for Georgia (Sakartvelo) or Greece (Elláda) :D

It's just how it works. Doesn't really bother me all that much.

PS: The う in 北海道 isn't just "weak" (in the sense of fading away or having a falling intonation), it lengthens the O sound in ど. Romanizing it to "Hokkaidou" would just confuse people even more. English just doesn't have a way to show a long vowel without diacritics. The "official" version is Hokkaidō (Hepburn), I think in Kunrei-shiki it would be "Hokkaidou", but then people would just mispronounce it.

To be clear, I agree with a lot of what you said. Hopefully I'm not strawmanning you on anything, what you wrote was quite lengthy.

Here's another example: in terms of pronunciation, English is fully capable of saying my country's name (Bulgaria) correctly — it just chooses not to.

I...partially...agree. However, the focus of what I was talking about is not a 忍者->'ninja' or 大君->'tycoon' sort of thing. Loanwords getting mangled, or even just totally reapprioriated, isn't (nearly as big of) an issue...at least, to me. One of my 'native languages' is English, after all, which is just a giant jumbled-up mess of like two dozen languages, with very few rules, and even less sense.

However, I was talking about specifically these matters as they regarding Linguistics, as a scientific field, fucking things up. The general population will always end up finding ways to screw up words...that is often a huge historical driving force behind the changes and emergences of languages...but I expect that linguists, people who are supposed to approach language, regardless of which one, with a little more respect, detail, and accuracy, would not be fucking things up in such ways.

If people wanna use "literally" to mean "figuratively", despite them being antonyms...go right ahead...you're totally butchering language, and removing the functionality of an important word that expresses and important concept, but hey, eventually somebody will make a new word to replace "literally" for its original meaning, and we'll repeat the cycle all over again...

But, if you are going to express, in pseudo-interlinguistic fashions, the words of a language, take the 30mins it requires to lookup how that language works, so that you reflect it accurately.

Language is a core component of societal functionality, and if languages is disrespected, damaged, or outright destroyed, it has dire consequences for society, whether people have the time, knowledge, and scrutiny to understand it, or not...

To put my main contention in a more poetic fashion... "Burn books in great blazes, and everyone takes notice; burn a page a day, and no-one bats an eye."

I don't know as much about language and stuff as you OP, but I do get annoyed by weird romanized stuff. I.e. the name "Kafuka" getting spelled "Kafka", I saw recently, and I'm just like UMM... I also saw that (iirc) even some of Tezuka-sensei's family prefers the spelling Tezka when romanized (???!).

As someone that has been using a Japanese word in my username virtually the entire time I've been online ("youko"), and it has one of those 'english silent' う characters... I'm a big proponent of writing foreign words out as they are spelled in their native language. I get that translators/etc do it to prevent non-native mispronunciation, but I'd rather get called "yuu-ko" incorrectly by white people than spell the word "yoko" just so they maybe don't.

just my random passing two cents

I didn't read every message but I too hate it when romanized words skip a u. It fills me with frustration when I see someone write out or oo with ō. Nobody ever copies it with the - and you can't tell whether it's おう or おお even if there is a -.

I used to watch a Vtuber who is supposedly a linguist and language teacher, who would teach Japanese on stream by writing on some drawing program, and for no reason at all she would always use ō when teaching vocabulary and it made me so frustrated because if someone is sitting there with a notebook writing lines of information for a random word they have the time to write a u or two.... She also has horrendous handwriting in both English and Japanese and half of it wasn't readable anyway ig

There are more replies than I have time to reply to individually, but I love the points people are making... Regional dialects, political functionality, slang, what it means to be 'correct', contractions, our collective disappointment at the numerous failings of an inept 'intellectual' elite...

Good stuff.

It would be incredible if 'the industry' (linguistics) had even a shred of the investment and consideration that we've all shown here.

To end on a (mostly) positive note...despite how 'saddening' it is to me that people, regardless of region or language, feel ashamed of their dialects...personally, I've found that lots of Japanese dialectical terms are not just nice or cool, but outright some of my favorites (ex: ちわっす as a great casual greeting)...hell, just like how my English lexicon *seemlessly* 🙃 mixes modern slang and millennia-old archaisms into the same sentence, so too have many Japanese archaisms found their way happily into my Japanese lexicon (ex: まぶだち is such a wonderful word, and a great way to refer to a best friend).

Language is cool, linguistics is fun, and incredible tools like Renshuu (allowing us all to easily learn and have these discussions) being available to all for free is a boon to society at large... If マイコー先生 had a boss, he'd be more than deserving of a raise.