A note on romanization of the East Asian languages

One thing that struck me while researching the East Asian languages is that of Chinese (including Cantonese (which has Jyutping), Hokkien (which has a romanization system promoted by the Taiwanese government), and Hakka (ditto)), Japanese, and Korean, Chinese has the most standard set of romanizations. If you want something said unambiguously in Japanese or Korean, you shouldn’t do it in romanization at all, but, rather, in kana and hangil, and possibly use local 汉字 if further ambiguities need resolved. Chinese (at least, on the mainland) actually use their own romanization system, 汉语拼音, to type their own language. Japanese do use romanization to type their own language, but it’s something called Waapuro romanization (thus “Toukyou” and “Oosaka” for　東京　and　大阪), which is not exactly like either the Hepburn or Nihon-siki romanizations used in print. Korean romanization is an honest mess, worse in its variety than Russian romanization (though not quite as bad as Arabic romanization).