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, or kana spelling, is a style of romanization of Japanese originally devised for entering Japanese into word processors (wādo purosessā, often abbreviated wāpuro) while using a Western QWERTY keyboard. Wāpuro rōmaji is now frequently employed in general-purpose computer input as well as word processing, but the name lives on.
In Japanese, the more formal name is , "Roman character kana conversion". One conversion method has been standardized as JIS X 4063:2000 (Keystroke to KANA Transfer Method Using Latin Letter Key for Japanese Input Method).
Spelling conventions
In practice, there are as many variants of wāpuro rōmaji as there are manufacturers of word processing and IME software. Typically all of Hepburn, Kunrei and Nihon-shiki-based romanizations are accepted, so that both si (Kunrei/Nihon-shiki) and shi (Hepburn) resolve to し. Some conventions, however, differ from standard romanizations:
- Owing to the difficulty of entering diacritics like macrons or circumflexes with standard keyboards — as well as the ambiguity of ō, etc. which in Hepburn can represent either おう or おお — long vowels are almost universally entered following kana spelling rules; thus, kou for こう and kuu for くう.
- By default the Nihon-shiki forms of romanization are supplied. Thus du usually produces づ rather than どぅ.
- Small kana can be entered by prefacing them with an x or l, e.g. xa for ぁ or ltu for っ. This is commonly employed for modern katakana combinations like ティ, which would be entered texi or thi. However, certain input methods map l to r.
- The irregularly spelled particles e へ, wa は, o を must be entered as written (he, ha and wo respectively), not as pronounced or transliterated. This also matches Nihon-shiki.
- The Hepburn spelling tchi for っち may be rejected, and cchi must be used instead.
- The Hepburn spelling mma is likely to be rendered っま, not the intended んま (nma). This is not an issue for revised Hepburn, which eliminates the -mm- forms in favor of -nm-.
- Moraic n, ん, is often entered as nn, although the standard n' is usually also accepted.
- Phonetic names can often be used for Japanese typographic symbols not found on standard keyboards. For example, in some IMEs ～ can be entered as nami or kara and an ellipsis (…) can be entered as tenten.
The wāpuro-style representation of long vowels, with "Toukyou" for "Tokyo", is popular with many fans of anime and other aspects of Japanese culture who are unfamiliar with (or unable to type) more formal romanization methods, as well as people who like its closer reflection of Japanese kana orthography. Less convenient spellings like the use of nn and x are almost never used outside IMEs.
One problem with the wāpuro-style representation of long vowels is that the distinction between 'ou' and 'oo' is not supported by Japanese pronunciation. The wāpuro-style distinction is based on kana usage, which represents the same sound (long 'o') as おう or おお, depending on the word. These different kana spellings are simply an isolated survival of historical usage. On the other hand, the kana spelling おう is pronounced in two different ways: as 'ō' in the meaning 'king' (王), and as 'ou' in the meaning 'to chase' (追う). Being based on hiragana, wāpuro style writes both these words as 'ou', ignoring the difference in pronunciation.
See also
"Wāpuro rōmaji"