How to space romaji
10 years ago
Posts: 91
Well, basically, I've been wondering for quite a while now. What are the rules you all use when putting in romaji titles? When to put in spaces, and what chars you don't capitalize. What do you do for the dash or emphasized katakana?
Just out of curiosity. I know how to translate Japanese, but for some reason stumble when trying to put in romaji.
10 years ago
Posts: 402
There aren't any rules that anyone enforces, but English speakers typically prefer spacing and capitalization that's closer to English standards, i.e. spaces around all particles and all words in title capitalized except particles. Don't know what you mean by dashes or emphasized kana -- is there such a thing in titles?
10 years ago
Posts: 91
Um, you know, the emphasized sounds. Like, ボール. It's typed with the hyphen. It's only used for Katakana, not sure what's it's called.
Yea, so I use lower case for "no" "wo" "wa" "to" "ni". The obvious stuff, the same as I would for "the" "a" "an". But things get a bit confusing when I come across stuff like "ga" "te" and others... Combine it with the previous char, lowercase it, or capitalize it...
10 years ago
Posts: 14
In that case, it isn't a hyphen, it's a long vowel. It's just used for writing long vowels in katakana, rather than writing another character.
10 years ago
Posts: 402
These are my personal preferences:
"ga" is the same particle as any other, so it gets the same treatment. Not sure what you mean by "te" -- if it's the -te form of a verb then it's a part of the preceding word.
As for elongated vowels, first of all, you get the "dash" only in katakana, which in most cases represents an English word, so you simply use the English word. I.e. ボール would simply be "ball", even in romaji.
If it's a made up name, then you come up with whatever sounds plausible.
Finally, if it's a Japanese word, then then you use hiragana style, since that word would normally be written in hiragana rather than katakana. So if it were a Japanese word, you'd spell it "bouru".
