World Bird Index

About "Romaji" Japanese Names

World Bird Index displays "Romaji" Japanese names" provided by Susumu Nakamura.

This will be useful for introducing the pronunciation of Japanese names to non-katakana readers.

"Romaji" writing rules

This list combines the Master IOC World Bird List, the Japanese names of the World Bird Names Correspondence List (Multiling IOC), and the 8th Revised Edition of the Japanese Bird Catalog, with the addition of "Romaji" Japanese names written in a new writing system.

The current "Rmaji" writing system, both Hepburn and Kunrei, was created for Japanese people, so it has the flaw that people from English-speaking countries cannot pronounce Japanese-specific sounds such as glottal stops (n), short consonants (tsu), and long sounds (words expressed with consecutive vowels or macron marks "ー"). Therefore, we devised a new "Romaji" writing system that uses only characters that can be typed normally on a PC and can be read with a pronunciation as close as possible to Japanese pronunciation so that overseas researchers and birdwatchers can pronounce Japanese names as closely as possible to Japanese people. The pronunciation of these notations is shown in English on the User's Manual sheet, and several English-speaking people have confirmed that they can be pronounced in a Japanese-like way. The notation is based on the Hepburn system, except for the newly devised ones below.

• In the current "Romaji" writing system, long sounds are expressed by adding a mountain shape or a line above the vowel, but English-speaking people do not understand the meaning of this and cannot type it on a PC, so we adopted the ":" used to lengthen vowels with phonetic symbols.
• With regard to consecutive vowels and long vowels, the emphasis is on meaning and pronunciation. Conjunctions that do not separate meanings, such as aa, ii, uu, ee, oo, ou, are changed to a:, i:, u:, e:, o:, o:. Since macrons (prolonged vowel marks and vowel extensions) are used as separators of meaning, not as hyphens, they are written the same as consecutive vowels.
• Currently, the short consonant (っ) is written by doubling the consonant (e.g. Datta), but this rule is ignored by English-speaking people, so a new writing method (e.g. Da^ta) has been devised to make it easier to remember to put one beat between "da" and "ta".
• When the nasal sound "n" is followed by a vowel, n, y, m, or j, a "'" is inserted between them to prevent the sound from continuing. In addition, for names with consecutive vowels that are separated by meaning, such as Haiiro (gray) and Orii (orii), a comma was inserted between the sounds to prevent the sounds from continuing (Hai'iro Ori'i). Furthermore, since oo is likely to be pronounced differently, for Futoo and Hosoo, oo was changed to o'o.

This new "Romaji" writing was used to write the Japanese names, but the following rules were also used with reference to the English names.

• The following kana, which are not on the 50-sound table, were unified into the following notation so that they would be pronounced similarly in English.
  Kie, Ji, Zu, Tsui, Ti, Tu, Di, Du, Du, Fa, Fi, Fe, Fo, Wi, We, Wo, Vi
• Separate the parts of the Japanese name that are different in meaning with a half-width space, and capitalize the first letter of each.
  (Example: Amerika Uzura Shigi).
• For "adjective + name or pattern of each part of the body", use a hyphen to connect them, following the English name.
  (Example: Ki-gashira, Zu-ao, Shiro-suji).

I followed this rule to write all Japanese names in "Romaji" writing characters, but they may be difficult to read because they are cut off too much with half-width spaces and hyphens (e.g. Me-jiro for mejiro, Ko-gamo for kokamo). However, I think that by doing this, it will be possible to create an explanation (dictionary) of each meaning (e.g. me = eye jiro,shiro = White).