Danbooru

Tag Alias: romaji -> roomaji

Posted under General

I never really argued for this one because I kind of feel the same way as jjj14 on it. ローマ is "Roma" as in "Rome", so "roomaji" feels odd (seems like it would fall under the standard for foreign words in katakana).

sgcdonmai said:
ローマ would be a loanword, yes, but I think ローマ字 is more of a Japanese compound

I'd say because it's like a compound/portmanteau, it could be left with one "o".

Then again, something like "Spanglish" uses a foreign term ("Spanish") for a given language ("español"), rather than, say, "españglish", but then there's the matter of the word not being "roma字"/"Roma字", so...

Alright, I'mma stop before running myself in circles. At the least, I'd like "roomaji" to get one end of an alias.

sgcdonmai said:
ローマ would be a loanword, yes, but I think ローマ字 is more of a Japanese compound (or, at least, is used so widely as such that it might as well be one).

+1 to the alias.

Yeah, this is my main problem with 'romaji'; it feels sort of halfway, like translating ウェールズ語 as wales-go instead of welsh. I could see a motivation for aliasing to roman_alphabet before aliasing to romaji. (Not that I'm suggesting that, mind you.)

I'm with those calling it a katakana loan and leaving it a single 'o'. Moreover (and while this typically isn't a valid argument), the romanization of "romaji" is pretty much frozen in English usage, much like "Tokyo" or "Osaka" which should be "Toukyou" and "Oosaka" respectively if we romanized everything into proper Japanese.

glasnost said:

[T]his is my main problem with 'romaji'; it feels sort of halfway, like translating ウェールズ語 as wales-go instead of welsh. I could see a motivation for aliasing to roman_alphabet before aliasing to romaji. (Not that I'm suggesting that, mind you.)

I am siding with this argumentation. roomaji is better than latin_alphabet is better than roman_alphabet is better than romaji. Wanted to bring this up ages ago.

On the other hand...

Shinjidude said:

Moreover (and while this typically isn't a valid argument), the romanization of "romaji" is pretty much frozen in English usage, much like "Tokyo" or "Osaka" (...).

...I do not live enough of my life in English to judge how unambiguously right Shinjidude is here.

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