1 Legal status

The system was originally promulgated as Japanese Cabinet Order No.3 as of September 21, 1937. But since this had been overturned by the SCAP during the Occupation of Japan, the Japanese government repealed it and decreed again as Japanese Cabinet Order No.1 as of December 29, 1954.

Kunrei-shiki has been recognized, along with Nihon-shiki, in ISO 3602:1989. Documentation--Romanization of Japanese (kana script) by the ISO. It was also recommended by the American National Standards InstituteThe American National Standards Institute (ANSI) is a private, non-profit standards organization that produces industrial standards in the United States. It is a member of ISO and IEC. ANSI's standards fall in many areas. In computing, ANSI standardized t (ANSI) after they withdrew their own standard, ANSI Z39.11-1972 American National Standard System for the Romanization of Japanese (Modified Hepburn), in 1994.

2 Usage

Despite its official recognition, Kunrei-shiki has not gained widespread acceptance in or outside Japan. The government generally uses Hepburn for romanizing Japanese names and terms in English contexts, as well as some less language-specific contexts such as passports and road signs. Most countries, including all countries in the AnglosphereThe term Anglosphere describes a certain group of English-speaking countries. It is ultimately derived from the term Anglo-Saxon''. The Anglosphere is usually thought of as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Other n, continue to use Hepburn.

Because Kunrei-shiki is based on Japanese phonology, English speakers sometimes find it strange, particularly when dealing with some newer kana combinations such as ティーム(チーム) team. In Hepburn, these would be distinguished as different sounds and represented timu and chimu respectively, giving better indications of the English pronunciations. For most Japanese speakers, however, the sounds ティ "t'i" and チ "ti" are the same phoneme; they are represented in Kunrei-shiki as t'îmu and tîmu respectively. The apostrophe indicates "unstable, but identified as the same sound". This kind of logic often confuses those who do not know Japanese phonologyPhonology is a subfield of grammar (see also linguistics). Whereas phonetics is about the nature of sounds (or phones) per se, phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language. For example, /p/ and /b/ in English are distinctive units o well.

Example: tat-u
Conjugation	Kunrei	Hepburn
Mizen 1	tat-a-	tat-a-
Mizen 2	tat-o-	tat-o-
Ren'yô	tat-i-	tach-i-
Syûsi	tat-u.	tats-u.
Rentai	tat-e-	tat-e-
Meirei	tat-e.	tat-e.

Today, the main users of Kunrei-shiki are native speakers of Japanese (especially within Japan) and linguistsBroadly conceived, linguistics is the study of human language, and a linguist is someone who engages in this study. The study of linguistics can be thought of along three major axes, the endpoints of which are described below: Synchronic and diachronic Sy studying Japanese. The main advantage of Kunrei-shiki is that it is better able to illustrate Japanese grammarThe Japanese language has a highly regular agglutinative verb morphology, with both productive and fixed elements. Typologically, its most prominent feature is topic creation: Japanese is neither topic-prominent, nor subject-prominent; indeed, it is commo, as Hepburn makes some regular conjugations appear irregular (see table, right). The most serious problem of Hepburn in this context is that it changes the stem of verbs, which is not reflected in the underlying morphologyMorphology is the following: In linguistics, morphology is the study of the structure of word forms. In biology, morphology is the study of the form or shape of an organism or part thereof. It can also be used to describe the form or shape of patterns for of the language.

Japanese Language Romanization Hepburn Nihon-shiki ( ISO 3602 Strict) Kunrei-shiki ( ISO 3602) JSL Wpuro See Romaji for a comparison.

ISO standards Japanese language

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