Kunrei-shiki

Kunreisiki (訓令式 "Cabinet-ordered system", romanized as Kunrei-shiki in Hepburn) is a romanization system, that is, a system for transcribing the Japanese language into the Roman alphabet.

Kunrei-shiki is known as ISO 3062 as it became a standard of the ISO. Kunrei-shiki is also known as the Monbushō system (after the Japanese Ministry of Education, or 文部省 Monbushō) because it used to be, and still occasionally is, taught to elementary school students. All students now learn the Hepburn system as part of the national curriculum, and Kunrei-shiki is now rarely used in schools.

Kunreisiki is based on the older Nipponsiki (Nihon-shiki) system, but modified for modern standard Japanese. For example, the word かなづかい, romanized kanadukai in Nipponsiki, is pronounced kanazukai in modern Japanese, and Kunreisiki uses the latter spelling.

Table of contents

1 Legal status 2 Usage 3 See also

Legal status

The system was originally promulgated as Japanese Cabinet Order No.3 as of September 21, 1937. But since this had been overturned by the SCAP during the Occupation of Japan, the Japanese government repealed it and decreed again as Japanese Cabinet Order No.1 as of December 29, 1954.

Kunreisiki has been recognized, along with Nipponsiki, in ISO 3602:1989. Documentation--Romanization of Japanese (kana script) by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). It was also recommended by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) after they withdrew their own standard, ANSI Z39.11-1972 American National Standard System for the Romanization of Japanese (Modified Hepburn), in 1994.

Usage

Despite its official recognition, Kunreisiki has not gained widespread acceptance in or outside Japan. The government generally uses Hepburn for romanizing Japanese names and terms in English contexts, as well as some less language-specific contexts such as passports and road signs. Most countries, including all countries in the Anglosphere, continue to use Hepburn.

Because Kunreisiki is based on the Japanese phonology, English speakers sometimes find it strange, particularly when dealing with some newer kana combinations such as ティーム(チーム) team. In Hepburn, these would be distinguished as different sounds and represented as tīmu and chīmu respectively, giving better indications of the English pronunciations. In Japanese phonology, however, the sounds ティ "t'i" and チ "ti" are the same phoneme, and are represented in Kunreisiki as t'îmu and tîmu respectively. The apostrophe indicates "unstable, but identified as the same sound". This kind of logic often confuses those who do not know Japanese phonology well.

Today, the main users of Kunreisiki are Japanese native speakers (especially within Japan) and linguists. The main advantage of Kunreisiki for linguists is that it is better able to illustrate Japanese grammar, as Hepburn makes some regular conjugations appear irregular. For instance, the polite form of hanas-u ("to speak") becomes hanash-i-masu in Hepburn and hanas-i-masu in Kunreisiki: the s -> sh shift is foreign to Japanese morphology, although it is reflected in pronunciation.

See also

See rōmaji; for a comparison of romanization systems.