(last updated 2009-10-05) LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM 1. Name of requester: Frank Bennett 2. E-mail address of requester: bennett at law.nagoya-u.ac.jp 3. Record Requested: Type: variant Subtag: hepburn Description: Hepburn romanization Prefix: ja-Latn 4. Intended meaning of the subtag: Indicates that the target content is Japanese text, romanized using a method derived from that first devised by the Society for the Romanization of the Japanese Alphabet in 1885, and popularized through the publication of a Japanese dictionary by J.C. Hepburn in 1886. The common characteristic of Hepburn romanization in its many variants, apart from the name, is an emphasis on approximating Japanese _pronunciation_ using English or European spelling conventions. Hepburn romanization does not attempt to parallel or transcribe the Japanese logographic scripts (hiragana or katakana). 5. Reference to published description of the language (book or article): Primary J.C.Hepburn, A Japanese-English and English-Japanese Dictionary, 3rd ed., 1886. http://www.halcat.com/roomazi/doc/hep3.html Revised Hepburn: ALA-LC Romanization Tables (available for download) http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman.html Secondary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepburn_romanization http://www.hadamitzky.de/english/lp_romanization_sys.htm http://www.kanji.org/cjk/samples/jnamevar.htm 6. Any other relevant information: One of the reasons for the large variety and lack of discipline in Japanese romanization schemes is the simplicity of Japanese phonetics. For a given Japanese word, there will be several more or less obvious ways of transliterating it into Latin characters. All such schemes lose such a large amount of information when compared with the original text that it is difficult to make a persuasive argument that one scheme is significantly better than another. The problem of information loss is particularly severe in the case of Japanese. Whereas in Chinese, the Han characters each have particular, fixed pronunciations, in Japanese these often have multiple readings. This, together with a limited syllabary, results in a crowded namespace with many homonyms. The result is an emphasis on visual form in much discourse; people in conversation can often be heard to describe the Han characters of particular words to one another for clarity (i.e. "kome-hen no seikou", meaning "the word pronounced 'seikou' that starts with a character containing the 'rice' radical"). The extremely loose connection between the roman transliterated form of a text and its original form has meant that romanized script is used only for very short phrases, where the intended meaning is often clear from the context, or in combination with a translation (as in many academic citation systems), where the translation provides a hint of the meaning of the transliterated phrase. In both cases, variances in the transliteration do not seriously impede readability, and therefore, both by intention and by accident, they have proliferated. By the same token, for many tagging purposes, identifying text as "Hepburn romanization" will be sufficient, and more precise description would be counter-productive (because most members of the population are indifferent to the small differences between the variants). If for particular purposes a need arises to tag specific, well-defined subvariants of Hepburn, they can be added in future. (file created 2009-10-05)