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| [[Image:Romanization minelba.jpg|thumb|250px|'''Minerva'''; [[Wikipedia:Hypercorrection|Hypercorrecting]] "r" into "l", while somehow retaining the "b" from Japanese phonemes. Oh, Takara.]] | | #REDIRECT[[Japanese language]] |
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| '''Romanization''' refers to the the the adaption of languages or words that do not use Latin letters to the 26-character Latin alphabet used in English (among other, less important languages.) Technically, the English-specific term would be "Anglicization".
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| The proper romanization of Japanese character names can sometimes be unclear. This wiki notes such ambiguities if they are considered significant.
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| In fandom the term romanization is frequently (incorrectly) used to refer to Japanese misspelling of English words.
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| ==Japanese and English==
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| Any phonetic alphabet is (at best) an approximation of the sounds it represents. The Japanese alphabet distinguishes between fewer [[Wikipedia:Phoneme|phonemes]] than most. This does not mean the language ''lacks'' those phonemes... English has more than 26 sounds, which is denoted by character-combinations ("ch" makes a sound that is not the combinations of the mouth-movements for "c" and "h", but a close cousin), but even those combinations are imperfect; the double-o represents different sounds in "cook" and "spook".
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| Notably the Japanese alphabet does not distinguish between the sounds "l" and "r", and English-speaking Japanese lack a mechanism for distinguishing the sounds in other languages. Foreign words in Japan frequently acquire ''creative'' spellings as a result of being rendered "down" into the Japanese alphabet then re-romanized, in such situations '[http://engrish.com/ Engrish]' is a perfectly logical rendering. Accuracy is generally a low priority, as English characters are ''generally'' used to look cool, not make sense to Japanese children.
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| In fairness, we mangled the name of their entire country.
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| {{see|Wikipedia:Romanization of Japanese}}
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| ==Notorious/Hilarious romanizations in Transformers==
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| Romanization confusion can either be;
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| # Improper Japanese rendering of English names
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| # Words whose English spelling is open to interpretation.
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| * Minelba {{m-}} Minerva
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| * Butt {{m-}} [[Blot]]
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| * [[Deathsaurus|Deszaras]]
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| * Freaking [[Rartorata]], for god's sake.
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| [[Category: Fandom]]<div id="wikia-credits"><br /><br /><small>From [http://transformers.wikia.com Teletraan I: The Transformers Wiki], a [http://www.wikia.com Wikia] wiki.</small></div>
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