One of Ours

Transliteration is the act of transcribing from one writing system into another, for example from Japanese to the Roman alphabet. There are several aspects of Japanese that make writing Japanese words in English an inherently vague and challenging process. For example, there are long vowels in Japanese that are meaningless when written out in English and which don't affect the pronunciation of words at all. The correct way to write "pretty girl" in Japanese is "bishoujo" with the extra 'u' in the middle, and yet it's often shortened to "bishojo" for brevity's sake. Is it better to leave the long vowels in the word, which complicates pronunciation and makes the words harder to remember, or should they be omitted? There's no simple answer. Famous place names like Tokyo and Osaka also have long vowels that are cut to avoid making the name needlessly long -- actually, Toukyou and Oosaka would be more accurate ways of writing the names, but it would be silly to do this. Another area where there is vagueness about how to write Japanese words or names in English is L and R. Is Japanese AV idol Aoi Sora better written as Aoi Sola? There's often little agreement and so both names are used sometimes -- there's no "right" way to write it. It can be very confusing, especially to search engines that can't tell that two similar words are the same.

Another problem is how to transliterate some Japanese syllables into Roman characters. Japanese is syllable-based: you can express sounds like ka, ki, ku, ke, and ko in Japanese, but not the consonant "k" all by itself. Three of the syllables in Japanese are pronounced "shi" "tsu" "chi" and thus, it's natural that they be written that way. This is part of the Hepburn system of transliterating, and most gaijin favor it because it makes the word easier to pronounce when read by English speakers. Another system, the Nihon system, forces these three syllables into neat "consonant + vowel" pairs, producing "si" "tu" and "ti" for the above three syllables even though the sounds aren't pronounced like that at all. As with computing platforms, the inferior system has been adopted as the official standard, and millions of Japanese children are forced to learn the Nihon system in Japanese schools -- a girl whose name was Chikako would be taught to write her name as Tikako, rendering it so that no one could pronounce it properly. Typical...