Kunrei-shiki

Kunreisiki (訓令式 "Cabinet-ordered system", romanized Kunrei-shiki in the Hepburn system) is a system of romanization, it is that is, a system that serves to transcribe the sounds of the Japanese language into the Roman alphabet.

Kunreisiki is known as the Monbushō (Japanese Ministry of Education, or 文部省) system abroad, because it is taught in the Monbushō elementary school curriculum. However, in Japan this name has never been used. The Kunrei-shiki system is also known as ISO 3602, as it became the ISO standard.

The Kunreisiki system is based on the earlier Nipponsiki (or Nihon-shiki) system, but modified to fit standard modern Japanese. For example, the word かなづかい, romanized kanadukai in Nipponsiki, is pronounced kanazukai in modern Japanese, and as such the Kunreisiki system uses this spelling.

Legal status

The system was originally promulgated as Japanese Cabinet Order No. 3 of September 21, 1937. But since this order was repealed by SCAP during the occupation of Japan, the government revoked it and re-enacted it as Japanese Cabinet Order No. 1 of December 29, 1954.

Kunreisiki has been recognized, together with Nipponsiki, in ISO 3602:1989. Documentation--Romanization of Japanese (kana script) by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). It has also been recognized 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.

Use

Despite its official recognition, Kunreisiki has not gained popular acceptance either inside or outside Japan. The government generally uses Hepburn to romanize Japanese names and terms in international contexts, as well as other less specific contexts such as passports and signs. Most of the countries use the Hepburn system.

As the Kunrei-shiki system is based on Japanese phonology, foreigners (such as English or Spanish speakers) sometimes find it strange, particularly when faced with new kana combinations such as ティーム (in its more traditional spelling チーム) team ("team", word borrowed from English). In Hepburn, these two scripts would be rendered differently as tīmu and chīmu respectively, giving a more accurate indication of their pronunciation in English. In Japanese phonology, however, the sounds ティ "t'i" and チ "ti" they 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 are not familiar with Japanese phonology.

Today, those who use Kunreisiki are mostly native Japanese speakers (especially within Japan) and linguists. The great advantage of Kunreisiki is that it is better able to illustrate Japanese grammar, since the Hepburn system makes some regular conjugations look irregular (see table on the right). The most serious problem with the Hepburn system is that it changes the verb stem, when, grammatically speaking, the stem should not be changed in any case.

Related topic

See Rōmaji for a comparison of Romanization systems.