alt Hacker NewsThe systems are obviously not isomorphic—Japanese kana are not entirely phonetic (they are just mostly so) and the different romanization systems choose differently whether to follow orthography or phonetics more closely.
> hanas* + (i)masu = hanasimasu (wrong!)
I cannot wrap my head around how this line in the article could be defensible. Like, if I don’t understand how Japanese is pronounced or written, and I just rely on Hepburn, I guess pasting these fragments of Hepburn together don’t produce the right Hepburn in the end?
YMMV indeed, but I think the lesson here is “this is why you don’t use Hepburn when you’re writing an article about Japanese verb conjugations”.
Hepburn does make sense for somebody with zero knowledge of Japanese but it just gets in the way when you are trying to explain how Japanese works. So lesson zero is “don’t rely on Hepburn” and IMO if you are interested in pronunciation and listening you should be using audio as your primary source.
I’m saying that Hepburn is isomorphic to Nihon-shiki since each is an encoding of kana. Each of them is a bijection to kana (actually that’s wrong; see EDIT below), therefore there’s a bijection between them. Obviously I’m not saying that arbitrary latin characters are isomorphic to kana, that would make zero sense.
I sympathise with your point about the benefits of Nihon-shiki romanization here. It might’ve been a better choice for this article.
> I cannot wrap my head around how this line in the article could be defensible
I think the reader would just read the next section where I use your argument to critique my own approach? And then make up their own mind whether it’s defensible to do something in the article, to raise pros/cons for why I did it, and then to keep on with the choice.
I wanted to illustrate this confusing point, and that’s how I chose to illustrate it. I think it’s confusing either way. I trust that a reader who actually wants to learn, and isn’t just being a pedant, would carry away the right set of conclusions, and would understand the isomorphism (again — see EDIT below) after those two sections.
> Like, if I don’t understand how Japanese is pronounced or written, and I just rely on Hepburn, I guess pasting these fragments of Hepburn together don’t produce the right Hepburn in the end?
Yeah. So that’s a learning opportunity that kana row shifting doesn’t quite follow rules you might expect from many other languages. Maybe that’s a clunky way to introduce it. I personally like this framing. As I noted somewhere else, you could imagine that I’ve chosen IPA notation instead.
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EDIT: Actually wait, Hepburn is not bijective for zu and ji. I haven’t thought about that. It’s not relevant to any of the conjugations so it doesn’t break the article, but that may be a good argument that it’s not worth the effort rescuing Hepburn.