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Probably the most important missing part here is the reason non-Hepburn systems like Kunrei stuck around for so long: they were designed to replace the Japanese script completely. This sounds outlandish today, but they were invented during the early Meiji years when Japan was adopting Western innovations and abandoning ancient traditions at breakneck speed. And because their target was thus Japanese people, not foreigners, they didn't need to worry about English phonology.
Incidentally, the Chinese pinyin system was also designed to replace Chinese writing, and Mao came quite close to abolishing Chinese characters entirely during the Cultural Revolution. Which also explains why it uses letters like x, c and q in ways that English readers find wildly unintuitive.
This was indeed the Communists’ original plan, but the real story is more interesting. Before taking over the country the plan was to replace characters with a pinyin-like system Latinxua Sin Wenz[1] and a whole generation in the north was taught to read this. After 1949, Mao was talked out of Romanization by none other than Stalin, who told him the Chinese language deserves its own script. Pinyin was designed after that, officially as a teaching tool, but probably by people who secretly still believed in more radical writing reform.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinxua_Sin_Wenz
https://archive.org/details/chineselanguagef0000defr/
Well, anyway … “evil Russians colonialists”.
† I know the PC term in North America is “first nations” or some such but for those outside NA using the old term is perfectly fine.
"…久保 becomes "Kubo" without the long vowel marked at all…" -- there is no long vowel! Just plain Kubo is correct.
"Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki optimize for a systematic, one-to-one mapping between kana and romanization. One kana, one romanization, always, with no exceptions." (Kunrei-shiki: exceptions! 猫は庭へ魚を運ぶ Neko wa niwa e sakana o hakobu)
Also: "Romanization is a scaffold, not a destination." ? I TOO AM A HUMAN WRITER WHO WRITES WITH MY OWN FINGERS.
But the history of the Romaji movement is indeed interesting - there were influential people who were quite serious about moving entirely to romaji at one point! It would have changed everything.
That's why Nihon-shiki is and will likely always remain the best system for serious students of Japanese - if you even need it at all. But then again, if you're just starting out, the best place to start is usually to immediately start learning kana.
This is a silly argument because anyone learning Japanese is going to need to learn how to pronounce it anyway. Also "serious Japanese learners" would likely be using kana.
Remembering both Hiragana and Katakana took me no more than a day each. Although I have to admit that I already tried learning them around 5 years ago and gave up back then out of lack of motivation.
I’m not trying to say you should avoid kana, just that there is some amount of intuition you can develop with romaji that does not work in kana.
Sure, maybe don’t force people to learn kana first. But Hepburn is kind of the worst of all worlds, it is just a waste of time to learn Hepburn.
I think the exception is people using the JSL textbooks :) there is a reasonable defense to using JSL. But you’re right. I think it’s indefensible to teach Hepburn to people interested in learning Japanese.
At least, that's the reason why I prefer still having kanji around.
So at a minimum, dropping kanji would mean the language needed to develop a system for where spaces go (which is less trivial than it sounds IMO). But also it would need to abandon a lot of homophones or find some way to disambiguate them. It could happen I guess, but I'm not sure how it could happen gradually.
This is a not a new method of writing, but this is how writing was done in the past, for many millennia.
The oldest writing systems, like the cuneiform and the Egyptian, also used, besides signs that indicated the pronunciation of a word, determinative signs, which indicated the semantic domain of the word, e.g. it is a name of a human profession, it is a name of an animal, it is a name of a tool made of metal, it is a geographic name, and so on.
The determinative signs could be Chinese radicals to continue the tradition, or they could be a special set of emojis.
It's a bit easier for Korean as it has far more available syllables (so fewer homonyms), but you could easily imagine these languages making different tradeoffs and ending up in different places.
When you're reading, you're trying to identify a substring and map it back to the unit of meaning, which is effectively the kanji. That works seamlessly with Hangul, because it mostly blocks (as syllables) the same way as kanji, and, as you mentioned, the extra vowels and silent consonants provide more disambiguation. With kana, the length you have to scan to read, and then guess at (using only context to disambiguate), a root word, is a lot more arbitrary.
Mechanically kana is just less compressed, less aligned, and makes it harder to visually identify/scan for units of meaning. Obviously Korean shows that you can make different tradeoffs, but for Japanese losing the kanji would probably necessitate reworking Kana as well - and unless the pronunciation changed, it would probably need to be in a way that represents the pitch accent, which is a modifier on the whole syllable, rather than just a few extra consonants or vowels.
I never get this line of reasoning - so are people listening to spoken japanese just in a perpetual state of confusion because they can't see the associated intended Kanji?
Also this coming from a person on a platform who's primary language is commonly pronounced with the last syllable/letter of each word used to start the next one.
The engli shlanguage ha sit sown nonsense.
Kind of humorously, groups sometimes develop lingo to avoid all this. E.g. the JP words for science and chemistry both have the standard pronunciation "kagaku", so people in industries where both terms are used often use nonstandard pronunciations (bakegaku for chemistry).
Also the homophones thing is probably lesser of the things I mentioned. A typical sentence might only have 1 or 2 overloaded words, but it will have lots of substrings that can be parsed multiple ways.
Secondly, there are many homonyms: words written with completely different kanji that sound exactly the same, very similar (e.g. same modulo pitch accent) or use the same spelling in kana.
Here are two words that don't sound the same at all. Let's use Hepburn, because it distinguishes them: kõri and kouri. One has a long o, the other has separate o and u. In hiragana, both are written こうり: exactly the same. kōri might be 公理 (axiom, self-evident truth) or 高利 (high interest rate). kouri is 小売 (retail, lit. "little selling").
If you're having a conversation with someone and don't know which "kõri" they are talking about, high interest rate or axiom, you can ask. But you cannot just ask a written text. You have to work it out from context.
Kanji eliminate the ambiguity, vastly simplifying reading. Reading Japanese that has been normalized to kana is murder. Especially if spaces are not introduced to mark word divisions. That is only done in hiragana books for small children!
Sometimes this happens in writing. A sentence happens to start with a couple of words that happen to be usually written in hiragana, with some particles after them, and you're left with a puzzle just working out where the word boundaries are. This requires backtracking in the general case; there is no principle like longest match.
Native speakers get confused in conversations and have to refer to kanji regarding which word they mean. Except they don't write down the kanji; they think of a very common word which has that kanji and say things like, "the shō syllable in my word is the same (kanji) as in shōrai".
The vast majority of the Japanese vocabulary consists of word roots made from the combination of two kanji. The language-making itself is not separable from kanji.
Japanese is only spoken language like others basically only for small children and idiots. Literate, grown-up Japanese is a written language first.
I think at some early point most Japanese learners (that don't already know a Chinese language) think kanji should be dropped. And at a later point I think most would change their mind as the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
While that is true, the kana themselves are not fully systematic for capturing Japanese. Hepburn can capture features that kana do not!
How about this set of examples, which shows both an advantage and drawback of Hepburn.
The hiragana sequence こうり (ko-u-ri) could be several things. one is 小売 (retail) where the division is こ・うり. Or it could be 公理 (axiom, self-evident truth) where the dividion is こう・り. Here the う in こう is no longer u but a vowel lengthening mark.
Hepburn spells these words differnetly: kouri and kōri.
Now, within this same example cluster we ecounter this: the word for ice is こおり （ko-o-ri). Unfortunately, Hepburn has this as kõri, creating an ambiguity not found in kana.
A modification to Hepburn allowing (or rather requiring) the spelling koori would resolve that.
> Three Japanese words, three Hepburn transcriptions. The letters you already know, telling you what they sound like.
I mean come on.
So… letters?
Also, the particles は を へ aren't always romanized the way they're pronounced; I can think of several places I've seen を written as wo despite being used as a particle.
Hepburn is an inappropriate method of writing Japanese, which nonetheless has become the dominant way of writing Japanese, just because it caters to the inability of most Americans to learn how other languages than English are written and pronounced.
Add to that that this is content marketing, and the whole thing really collapses. I'll consume interesting content marketing, I may even consume interesting slop, but I can't consume slop content marketing.
Besides this historical motivation, there exists no technical argument in favor of any of them.
I do not agree at all that Nihon-shiki can sabotage the ability of Japanese people to learn and pronounce English.
Except for the native English speakers, all the other people of the World who are familiar with other languages besides their own are also familiar with the fact that every language has its own system of writing and pronunciation, whose rules you must learn, including the alphabet variations.
It is the dominance of English in the international relations after WWII which sabotages the ability of most native English speakers to learn other languages, especially to learn how they are pronounced, so in foreign countries the native English speakers usually stand out much more than the native speakers of any other languages, because of their pronunciation, which is found funny by the locals.
Making the rules for writing your own language more complex for your own country and for most other countries of the World, just to make them simpler for the citizens of a certain privileged country, is not a behavior that I can approve, because I find it too subservient.
Rather, he (rightfully) criticized the generally negative effect caused by the deployment of anglocentric teaching methods (exclusively for the convenience of the Anglo world).
In addition, he observed a negative feedback of such strategems on the Anglo world itself, in as much as it forms an "impediment by convenience" for them to learn about other cultures (and thus rise a bit on the scale of human development).
So in a way what he said is the opposite of what you claim he did. Might that have been what triggered your inadequate reaction?
As for "arrogance", you stated that Kunrei/Nihon have been "sabotaging Japanese people's ability to learn and pronounce English correctly", as if there was any value in that for a civilization that culturally stands much higher than, say, the USA.
And as for "racism", it is well known that was an important factor on the "no prisoners" approach the US took against Japan, and also in terroristically and sadistically napalming one city after another (then repeated in Korea and Vietnam).