[KS] The Mystery of the Breve

[Charles Muller]

I generally support the positions taken by Otfried in this thread, but 
would like to differ on a few points made about the situation of Japan.

 > Otfried Cheong wrote:
> Frank Hoffmann wrote:
>> Let me ask you then: How can it be that the Hepburn romanization
>> system for Japanese has worked so well for the past 120 years for
>> Japan? It uses macrons over o and u, not present in standard Latin
>> fonts either. Japanese have passports too and may once in a while
>> order books at Amazon.com or use a Visa card to do shopping. I
>> seriously do not know the answer, but my best hunch would be that 
>> those "extra" accents would simply be left out whenever it is 
>> anticipated that they might create problems with American or other 
>> international services such as postal delivery or order systems.

Frank is right. They do not use macrons in these official documents, 
but I don't think it necessarily follows that Hepburn has worked well 
for over a century, based merely on the fact that a competing system 
has not been proposed in the interim.

I would say that it is more the case (as with McC-R and RR in Korea) 
that it is primarily foreigners who learn these systems, and are 
concerned about them. How many ordinary Koreans (i.e. not scholars) do 
you know who really know how to romanize Korean in any kind of system?

> I think there are three factors:
> 
> 1) Japanese learn how to romanize properly in school. 

What??? Why do you think this? I have been teaching in Japan at the 
university level for 16 years, and during this time I have met very 
few students (even at Tokyo University) who know how to use Hepburn 
consistently and correctly. Usually, Shinjuku is written as Shinjyuku, 
and Chiba is written as Tiba, Shibuya as Sibuya, etc. For place names 
and family names, it is quite common to see "oh" used for o-macron 
(thus, Kohfukuji, Ohshima, etc.) And why should they? These 
romanization systems are primarily for foreigners, so unless they are 
specialist scholars, or someone working in a certain type of 
government office, I don't think most Japanese (like most Koreans) 
care at all about how their language is romanized.

> This is of course
> made easier by the fact that writing in Romaji is a popular input method
> for computers as well.  I've seen Japanese write entire long emails in
> Romaji because they used a computer where no Japanese input method or
> fonts were available. 

I have never seen such a thing, so I doubt it is very common.

> 2) There is usually little loss of information when the macron is left
> out. The Tokyo city website is http://www.metro.tokyo.jp, with no fear
> of confusion.

This is a completely different matter. For a long time, HTTP protocol 
could not handle anything but ASCII, so URLs have never included 
macrons. Even though now the character set for URLs has technically 
been expanded, a lot of server applications will not correctly pass 
non-ascii characters in URLs, so it would be foolish to include any 
kind of diacritics in a URL.

There is also a clear lack of concern about application of diacritics 
in major, internationally-known place names like Tokyo and Kyoto, but 
I think this is a again a different matter. These have been romanized 
around the world for centuries without diacritics, and thus have 
become standardized in this format by convention.

Regards,

Chuck

-------------------

A. Charles Muller

University of Tokyo
Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, Faculty of Letters
Center for Evolving Humanities
Akamon kenkyū tō #722
7-3-1 Hongō, Bunkyō-ku
Tokyo 113-0033, Japan

Web Site: Resources for East Asian Language and Thought
http://www.acmuller.net

<acmuller[at]jj.em-net.ne.jp>

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