345triangle said:
well, it's how japanese people type, for example (i do it too, because it's faster).
I confess to typing like that too at times because it saves keystrokes, but (For example, I often let my phone's autocorrect paper over simple typos and insert apostrophes automatically in words like "I'll" and "didn't", but that doesn't mean that my quick-and-dorty typing represents
good spelling.)
which system makes more sense depends on who the intended user is. as a pronunciation aid for people who can't speak the language, like in the case of translated videogames, the shi/tsu/chi/etc system makes sense, but for cases where "romaji" (or roomazi, or whatever) are necessary for japanese people, like typing QWERTY, it makes sense to base things on what they already know.
I agree wholeheartedly that romanization has to put people who can't speak the language first. If you already speak Japanese, odds are you can write Japanese. (The sole redeeming thing about Pinyin, which also presupposes a knowledge of Mandarin and its quirks on the user, is that there really are native speakers of Mandarin who are illiterate, and for them Pinyin is a good teaching tool. For everyone else, Wade-Giles or Yale or something else would serve their interests better.)
Until just a few decades ago the "romanization is for international use first and domestic second" was solidly accepted, and using the guiding principle of basic consonant sounds on English and vowels on Latin/Spanish/Italian, with special marks for long/short vowels, etc., many languages were romanized in a consistent way. Even if you can't speak the languages, you can probably figure out "Chōshi" and "Mao Tse-Tung" and "Chŏnju". Then the governments started gumming up the works by making up their own schemes that don't interact well with Western languages and are foisting things like "Tyousi" and "Mao Zedong" and "Jeonju" on us. You can't read those without becoming acquainted with the languages they came from.
Getting back to Japanese, the Japanese language today has assimilated so many words containing formerly-foreign sounds like "tu", "ti", "fo", "je", "du", etc. that it would never be realistic to use
Kunreishiki or
Nippon-shiki romanization ever again.
It's a shame that the people who designed computer input method editors favored the less-phonetic system; that's the only reason why you still see things like "tu" for "tsu", and why those un-phonetic systems aren't in history's dustbin. Today people have to type "aisuthi-" for アイスティー (
aisu tii, iced tea) and even "maccha" (or, God forbid, "mattya") for the native word 抹茶 (
matcha; a special kind of green tea).
This input system is a huge stumbling block to recording Okinawan languages, which have become very difficult to type in the computer age because of the difficulty in inputting basic syllables like "ti", "tu", "di", "du", etc. that are normal in Okinawan but don't occur in native Japanese words. "Life is a treasure" is
nuchi du takara in Okinawan, but good luck typing that -- you can only get the "du" どぅ sound if you type "dwu".
Andrew Horvat's book "Japanese Beyond Words: How To Walk And Talk Like A Native Speaker" contains a
great discussion of this problem; I have a hard copy and the book is well worth a read.
Now that an entire generation has grown up typing weirdly-romanized Japanese more than they've read normally-romanized Japanese, expect to see more typos like "Natume" and "Maxtukoi" in the coming years. It really is unfortunate.
