History UsefulNotes / JapaneseRomanization

* ''[[VideoGame/ShadowHearts Shadow Hearts: From The New World]]'': Shub Niggurath → she-bu-ni-gu-ra-su → Jeb Niglas

* The lack of ending consonants. "n" is the only consonant that Japanese allows to end a syllable, so when foreign words are transliterated into the Japanese syllabaries they end up with extra vowels. "U" is commonly used since it's often elided in speech when it comes between unvoiced consonants; for this reason, Old Hepburn usually wrote it as an apostrophe. When "r" comes at the end of a syllable or is followed by a consonant, it's typical to double the preceding vowel (represented by a long dash in katakana), so for instance "number" becomes "nanbaa". The trailing "s" of plural nouns is often omitted, because the Japanese language lacks plurals.

* The pair spelled the way they are in hiragana (ou): Toukyou. Again, in English this is a different sound, a diphthong as in the word "sound".

* ''{{Wild ARMs}}'': Jack Vambrace (a vambrace is an arm guard) → va-n-bu-re-i-su → Jack Van Burace

Note that some names were originally in Japanese but [[AsLongAsItSoundsForeign meant to ''sound'' English]]. These names ''have'' no "real" translation[[note]]Except if the author gave an official romanization, but this not always happens.[[/note]], and can result in all kinds of arguments. A good example is the town called "ri-ze-n-bu-r" from ''Manga/FullmetalAlchemist'', which has been variously translated as Resembool, Risembul, Riesenburgh, and Liesenburgh.

* Japanese don't really have a "f" sound; "f" is basically a somewhat stronger version of "h" (perhaps not coincidentally, "fuu" means "wind" is Japanese); the -u syllable is usually written in English as "fu" but the others are "ha, he, hi, ho". This makes for weird combinations like "fu-(small ya)" for "fya" to stand in for "fa". Sometimes the two are interchangable; for example, "hu" in Japanese would still be spelled with the "fu" syllable.
* The lack of ending consonants. "n" is the only consonant that Japanese allows to end a syllable, so when foreign words are transliterated into the Japanese syllabaries they end up with extra vowels. "U" is commonly used since it's often elided in speech when it comes between unvoiced consonants; for this reason, Old Hepburn usually wrote it as an apostrophe. When "r" comes at the end of a syllable or is followed by a consonant, it's typical to double the preceding vowel (represented by a long dash in katakana), so for instance "number" becomes "nunbaa". The trailing "s" of plural nouns is often omitted, because the Japanese language lacks plurals.

** "v" can be written as "u" with a digraph on it, followed by a vowel, but more often is just rendered with a "b" (e.g. "violin" would be "ba-i-o-ri-n"). This has caused the weapon name [[GatlingGood "Vulcan cannon"]] to be mistranslated as "Balkan cannon" in such games as ''VideoGame/MagicalChase'' and ''VideoGame/ForgottenWorlds''.

* For some reason, Japanese sometimes treats an ending "m" like an "n", leading to words like "combo" and "computer" being turned into "ko-n-bo" and "ko-n-pyuu-ta".
** This is because "n" is assimilated so it's pronounced "m" before labials (i.e. "b", "p", and "m" in Japanese), so writing it "ko-mu-bo" is unnecessary. The same thing happens in English when the prefix "in-" is added to a word beginning with "p" (i.e., in+possible=impossible). This assimilation sometimes also happens in other languages, whether the speakers are aware of it or not.
* The "w" sound exists in Japanese only in the syllable "wa"; when "wa" is the wrong sound, the consonant gets replaced by the vowel "u". Sometimes this "u" absorbs the following vowel: "wolf" turns into "u-ru-fu".

* The five vowels "a", "e", "i", "o" and "u" are each pronounced one way in Japanese, but in context these vowels are rarely pronounced the same way in English. The katakana used to represent loanwords may either attempt to approximate the English vowel sounds or represent the vowels as written (which in words not native to English is often closer to the ''original'' pronunciation). One old controversy among Japanese speakers was whether ''Franchise/{{Ultima}}'' should really begin with "a" instead of "u".

[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese Japanese Romanization]] is the way that Japanese text gets transliterated into the Roman alphabet. The romanized text is referred to in Japanese as "Rōmaji", from Roman alphabet + "ji" meaning "characters" (much the way "Kanji" literally means "Chinese characters", hence it being the on'yomi reading of "hanzi"). The word Romanization can actually refer to using ''any'' Latin-based alphabet (French, German, Polish, ...) to write a words originally written with ''any'' non-Latin script, but in English-speaking fandom it almost universally refers to Japanese-to-English transliteration. See UsefulNotes/{{Romanization}}, UsefulNotes/JapaneseWritingSystem.

[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese Japanese Romanization]] is the way that Japanese text gets transliterated into the Roman alphabet. The romanized text is referred to in Japanese as "Rōmaji", from Roman alphabet + "ji" meaning "characters" (much the way "Kanji" literally means "Chinese characters"). The word Romanization can actually refer to using ''any'' Latin-based alphabet (French, German, Polish, ...) to write a words originally written with ''any'' non-Latin script, but in English-speaking fandom it almost universally refers to Japanese-to-English transliteration. See UsefulNotes/{{Romanization}}, UsefulNotes/JapaneseWritingSystem.

One more issue is how to treat "n" followed by a vowel. Since "n", unlike other consonants, does not have to have a vowel sound after it, it's ambiguous whether "ni", for instance, refers to a single syllable or to a "n" followed by a separate "i". Some systems use an apostrophe to indicate this. (Examples: ''ren'ai'', "romantic love", vs. ''re'nai'', "no ''re''"; ''shin'en'', "passion" vs. ''shinen'', "thought".)

There are a few syllables that turn into combinations, like "ji-ya", "chi-yo", "ri-yu", etc., with the second syllable written smaller. (The smaller kana are a modern invention, and historical kana usage also included many confusing alternate spellings.) In modern Hepburn this is turned into "ja", "cho", "ryu", but you can also see "jya"; Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki actually use "zya". Old Hepburn only did this consistently with sh(a/o/u), ch(a/o/u) and j(a/o/u), and wrote, for instance, the names of the city of Kyoto and the island of Kyushu as "Kiyoto" and "Kiushu."