Romanization
Romanization refers to the adaptation 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".
The proper Romanization of Japanese character names can sometimes be unclear. This wiki notes such ambiguities if they are considered significant.
Japanese (カタカナ、ひらがな、感じ Katakana, Hiragana, Kanji)
Any writing system is (at best) an approximation of the sounds it represents. The Japanese writing system distinguishes between fewer 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 combination 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". Japanese is a bit hard to romanize is because its writing systems, Kana (Katakana (カタカナ) and Hiragana (ひらがな)) and Kanji, have no official romanization. So, many people romanize Japanese based on the sounds they hear.
Kana is a syllable script, this means its not using one sound per symbol like Latin scripts but two sounds per symbol, like ど do, は ha, ぐ gu, and け ke. Kanji (感じ) is Chinese character-like, well, this is hard to explain. Better go to Kanji.
Notably the Japanese script 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 script then re-Romanized; in such situations "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.
In fairness, we mangled the name of their entire country. And it's happened back-to-front in Transformers, now.
- For further information, see: Wikipedia:Romanization of Japanese
Notorious and hilarious Romaji in Transformers
Romaji confusion can either be;
- Improper Japanese rendering of English names
- Words whose English spelling is open to interpretation.
- Minelba—Minerva
- Butt—Blot
- Clerken—Kraken
- "Comvoy", used on the packaging for Transformers: Mystery of Convoy
- Variations of "Destron", including "Deathtron" and "Destoron"
- Deszaras
- Rartorata
- Transformers Collection Chear
- A questionable case would be the various Japanese Mirage toys named "Rijie" (Robot Masters, Binaltech)—although the character's name was based on the original toy's vehicle mode, a Ligier racing car, Takara's insistence on using a Romanization of the name that's considerably different from the car manufacturer's name might hint at a willful decision.
Korean (한글 Han-gul)
Although the Korean language has not had much effect in the Transformers universe, Transformers programs are aired in the Korean language. This could be confusing, because, just like Japanese, many names on English Transformers were different on Korean Transformers. The Korean language uses the Hangul writing system created by Dynasty Joseon on 1443. Modern day Hangul use Revisised Romanization of Korean to romanize it.
Hangul seems more like Chinese characters (Hanzi), but it is actually a true alphabet of 24 consonant and vowel letters. However, instead of being written sequentially like the letters of the Latin alphabet, Hangul letters are grouped into blocks, such as 한 han, each of which transcribes a syllable. The syllable 한 han may look like a single character, but it is composed of three letters: ㅎ h, ㅏ a, and ㄴ n.
Hangul letters and digraphs are called jamo (자모; 字母) or natsori (낱소리). There are 24 letters and 27 digraphs (and sometimes trigraphs) formed from these letters in the modern script. Of the letters, fourteen are consonants (ja-eum 자음, 子音 "child sounds") and ten are vowels (mo-eum 모음, 母音 "mother sounds"). Five of the consonants are doubled to form the five "tense" (faucalized) consonants of Korean (see below), while another eleven sequences are formed of two different consonants. The ten vowel letters are combined into eleven sequences for diphthongs.
The following letters and clusters of letters are found in the modern script:
14 consonant letters: ㄱ g, ㄴ n, ㄷ d, ㄹ r on top/l on bottom, ㅁ m, ㅂ b, ㅅ s, ㅇ not read on top/ng on bottom, ㅈ j, ㅊ ch, ㅋ k, ㅌ t, ㅍ p, ㅎ h
5 double ("tense") consonants: ㄲ kk, ㄸ tt, ㅃ pp, ㅆ ss, ㅉ jj
11 consonant clusters: ㄳ gs, ㄵ nj, ㄶ nh, ㄺ rg, ㄻ lm, ㄼ lb, ㄽ ls, ㄾ lt, ㄿ lp, ㅀ lh, ㅄ bs
6 vowel letters: ㅏ a, ㅓ eo, ㅗ o, ㅜ u, ㅡ eu, ㅣ i
4 iotized vowels (with a y): ㅑ ya, ㅕ yeo, ㅛ yo, ㅠ yu
5 (iotized) diphthongs: ㅐ ae, ㅒ yae, ㅔ e, ㅖ ye, ㅢ ui
6 vowels and diphthongs with a w: ㅘ wa, ㅙ wae, ㅚ oe, ㅝ wo, ㅞ we, ㅟ wi
Confusion of romanization of Hangul
Hangul not exactly a what-you-see-is-what-you-must-read alphabet. Some letters are not read when they are on bottom of a glyph (in this case, ㄹ and ㅇ have their own rules when placed on top or bottom). For example, Hangukeo (Korean Language) written as 한국어 and supposed to read as Hangugeo, Hangukeun ne gyejeori tturyeothada (Korea has four distinct seasons) written as 한국은 네 계절이 뚜렷하다 and supposed to read as Hangugeun ne gyeojeoli ttureoshada. This confusion has been corrected in Indonesian Hangul.
