[XeTeX] Polyglossia: Support for romanization of CJK

[Mike "Pomax" Kamermans]

On 6/19/2011 9:59 PM, Andy Lin wrote:
> Do you have examples of this outside of proper names? I haven't come 
> across such a case and it'd be interesting to see. But wouldn't such 
> variation defeat the purpose of romanization? I mean, consider the 
> confusion that the Taiwanese government has caused by variously 
> supporting Hanyu pinyin, Tongyong pinyin, and Wade-Giles (you can see 
> all three in use on the Taipei metro system).

Legion. Any random textbook on Japanese for English audiences using 
romanised Japanese will be in one of three romanisations - "hepburn" for 
phonetic approximation (because the audience is English speakers), 
"kunrei" for syntactic accuracy (usually only used when the authors were 
Japanese and they don't know the target audience language), and Yale 
because it just refuses to die (it's a terrible romanisation scheme). 
Then there are the phonetic schemes that must necessarily be different 
because of orthographical differences between langauges. The 
romanisations "janai" works well for English readers, as it approximates 
the Japanese pronunciation quite well; however, for German readers the 
"j" is pronounced like an English leading "y", so this romanisation 
would be pronounced as "yanai", and would be wrong. Thus, for German 
audiences, you would use something like "dzjanai" to make sure that even 
if the meaning is unknown, the correct pronunciation is conveyed.

> There's IPA, but that's only for phonetic/phonemic transcription in 
> linguistics papers, and you wouldn't want to hyphenate it anyway. I am 
> curious about the necessity of hyphenating romanization. Is it 
> desirable? I would have thought that foreign words should be treated 
> like proper nouns in running text.

It would certainly be desirable in a work that is forced to contain 
romanised Japanese. While there are no spaces in native Japanese, there 
are spaces in romanised Japanese as there are fairly clear word 
boundaries. A phrase like 勉強する為にパソコン使ったり音楽を聞いたりする 
事もないだろう, which lacks any spacing whatsoever, becomes the 
romanised phrase "benkyou suru tame ni pasokon tsukattari ongaku o 
kiitari suru koto mo nai darou", and if that phrase runs past the line 
length at "tsukattari", that definitely deserves hyphenation 
(tsu-kattari, tsuka-ttari or tsukatta-ri ; second hyphenation preferable 
to tsukat-tari because of how the word is segmented when spoken. 
Syllables with a vowel sound end on that vowel sound in Japanese, making 
tsukat-tari artificially unnatural).

- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com