Romaji Flavor

Most flavors of romaji are recognized. Special or non-obvious items are mentioned here.

Long vowels can be entered by repeating the vowel, or with ``-'' or ``^''. Often with romaji, a ``-'' is used to link related phrases. For example, 日本語で (``in Japanese'') should be romanized nihongode, but is often romanized nihongo-de. Unfortunately, this is indistinguishable from nihongoude. Therefore, this server neither accepts nor generates romaji with this ``linking dash''.
In general Japanese is written without spaces, so in theory, romaji should have no spaces as well. Unfortunately, students (and teachers) often use romaji as a crutch to escape the ``difficult task'' of learning kana, and find using spaces makes this crutch easier.

The Japanese in edict has no spaces, so besides being a poor crutch, using spaces in the romaji you feed this server would make no sense. Therefore, this server removes any spaces from the romaji you type (keeping in mind the next item in this list, it might sometimes add a single quote).
In situations where an ``n'' could be vague, as in ``na'' being な or んあ, use a single quote to force the latter. Therefore, something like ``kenichi'' will be interpreted as けにち while ``ken'ichi'' will be interpreted as けんいち.
The is no concept of upper or lower case to Japanese writing. Often, romaji is used to map a Japanese word or name into another language (such as English), and in such cases the linguistic conventions of the target language would take hold. In English, this would mean that proper names and sentences' first words would be capitalized, i.e. ``Taro Tanaka''.

Romaji is used in this server not to map Japanese to English (or any other language), but to merely map it to an encoding which most systems in the world can handle. That being the case, using upper case in the romaji would make no sense. The example name above would be written ``tanakataro''.
The romaji has been richly extended with many non-standard combinations such as ふぁ or ちぇ, which are represented in intuitive ways (as ``fa'' and ``che'' respectively).

   wo→を    we→ゑ    wi→ゐ 
   va→ヴァ  vi→ヴィ  vu→ヴ    ve→ヴェ   vo→ヴォ 
   di→ぢ   dzi→ぢ   dya→ぢゃ dyu→ぢゅ  dyo→ぢょ 
   du→づ   tzu→づ   dzu→づ 
  (the following kana are all just small kana)
   xa →ぁ  xi →ぃ    xu→ぅ    xe→ぇ    xo→ぉ 
   xu →ぅ  xtu→っ   xwa→ゎ   xka→ヵ   xke→ヶ 
   xya→ゃ  xyu→ゅ   xyo→ょ

Comments appreciated

[Return to Glossary] [Return to Main Page] [Jump to Index]

(this page's master source last modified 26 years, 8 months ago)
This reply to request 4,501,722 made just for you Tue Aug 11th 2026 5:14pm JST [load currently averaging 56870 requests/day over a 79-second sample]