Japanese transliteration: ja-Latn-hepburn

[Doug Ewell]

CE Whitehead <cewcathar at hotmail dot com> wrote:

> Hi, I agree basically with what you are asking for; however my point 
> was that, as with [pinyin], there seems to be some acceptable 
> variation of this romanization--that is it does not have to refer to 
> exactly one standard, so long as both are similar enough.  Is that 
> right?

Sort of.  It's not so much a matter of "some acceptable variation" of 
Hepburn, which sounds vague, but rather that there are three rather 
clearly defined varieties of Hepburn, each with its own rules.  There is 
probably a small amount of allowable variation in practice, since we are 
talking about using a Western writing system to write an Eastern 
language.

I wonder if we ought to be talking now about registering variants for 
Korean romanizations, while we are thinking about these issues, so we 
don't end up having to invent our guidelines all over again.  There is 
Revised Romanization, McCune-Reischauer, and Yale, plus a few others in 
much less common use.

--
Doug Ewell  |  Thornton, Colorado, USA  |  http://www.ewellic.org
RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14  |  ietf-languages @ http://is.gd/2kf0s