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The romanization of Japanese is the use of Latin script to write the Japanese language. [1] This method of writing is sometimes referred to in Japanese as rōmaji ( ローマ字 , lit. ' Roman letters ' , [ɾoːma(d)ʑi] ⓘ or [ɾoːmaꜜ(d)ʑi] ) .
There are a small number of municipalities in Japan whose names are written in hiragana or katakana, together known as kana, rather than kanji as is traditional for Japanese place names. [1] Many city names written in kana have kanji equivalents that are either phonetic manyōgana , or whose kanji are outside of the jōyō kanji .
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.
While many other native Japanese words (for example, 汝 nanji archaic word for "you") with ん were once pronounced and/or written with む (mu), proper historical kana only uses む for ん in the case of the auxiliary verb, which is only used in classical Japanese, and has morphed into the volitional ～う (-u) form in modern Japanese.
Japanese does not have separate l and r sounds, and l-is normally transcribed using the kana that are perceived as representing r-. [2] For example, London becomes ロンドン (Ro-n-do-n). Other sounds not present in Japanese may be converted to the nearest Japanese equivalent; for example, the name Smith is written スミス (Su-mi-su).
Transliteration, which adapts written form without altering the pronunciation when spoken out, is opposed to letter transcription, which is a letter by letter conversion of one language into another writing system. Still, most systems of transliteration map the letters of the source script to letters pronounced similarly in the target script ...
A (hiragana: あ, katakana: ア) is a Japanese kana that represents the mora consisting of single vowel [a]. The hiragana character あ is based on the sōsho style of kanji 安, while the katakana ア is from the radical of kanji 阿. In the modern Japanese system of alphabetical order, it occupies the first position of the alphabet, before い.
Although Kunrei-shiki romanization is the style favored by the Japanese government, Hepburn remains the most popular method of Japanese romanization. It is learned by most foreign students of the language, and is used within Japan for romanizing personal names, locations, and other information, such as train tables and road signs.