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The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana.Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis.
Nihon-shiki (Japanese: 日本式ローマ字, lit. 'Japan-style', romanized as Nihonsiki in the system itself) is a romanization system for transliterating the Japanese language into the Latin alphabet. Among the major romanization systems for Japanese, it is the most regular one and has an almost one-to-one relation to the kana writing system.
The earliest Japanese romanization system was based on Portuguese orthography.It was developed c. 1548 by a Japanese Catholic named Anjirō. [2] [citation needed] Jesuit priests used the system in a series of printed Catholic books so that missionaries could preach and teach their converts without learning to read Japanese orthography.
Kunrei-shiki romanization (Japanese: 訓令式ローマ字, Hepburn: Kunrei-shiki rōmaji), also known as the Monbusho system (named after the endonym for the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) or MEXT system, [1] is the Cabinet-ordered romanization system for transcribing the Japanese language into the Latin alphabet.
Japanese is an agglutinative, synthetic, mora-timed language with simple phonotactics, a pure vowel system, phonemic vowel and consonant length, and a lexically significant pitch-accent. Word order is normally subject–object–verb with particles marking the grammatical function of words, and sentence structure is topic–comment.
Japanese writing system terms (2 C, 25 P) Jindai moji (3 P) K. Kana (1 C, 69 P) Kanji (3 C, 65 P) R. Romanization of Japanese (7 P) Pages in category "Japanese ...
Wāpuro thus does not represent some distinctions observed in spoken Japanese, but not in writing, such as the difference between /oː/ (long vowel) and /oɯ/ (o+u). For example, in standard Japanese the kana おう can be pronounced in two different ways: as /oː/ meaning "king" ( 王 ), [ 2 ] and as /oɯ/ meaning "to chase" ( 追う ). [ 3 ]
Because the system's orthography is based on English phonology instead of a systematic transcription of the Japanese syllabary, individuals who do not speak Japanese will generally be more accurate when pronouncing unfamiliar words romanized in the Hepburn style compared to other systems.