Romanization policy needed: apostrophes for disambiguating ん followed by a vowel

You know, like junichirou vs jun'ichirou. Indicating that it's んい, not に. I guess there's some technical term for it I don't know.

As brought up in forum #31022, we don't have a policy on this. We should institute one. Even if I may regret it. =P

I will accept going either way on this. The upside to using the apostrophes is specificity.

The downside, speaking from a purely practical standpoint, is that we'll probably need a rule of always aliasing the non-apostrophe versions to the apostrophe version. Which is a bit annoying, but the vast majority of people (myself included) don't use the apostrophes and thus wouldn't find the character without an alias. And there could be significant work to be done in the back catalog of posts on this. Not to mention all the artist entry movement that would be needed (huge pain in the ass), if we could even find all the applicable cases.

So for me, it's a tradeoff of specificity vs workload. That said I'll probably just go with whatever gets more support.

I'll cast my vote for the specific side. Doing otherwise can lead to naming confusion.

Example: Ten'ou Haruka, a.k.a. Sailor Uranus. The pronunciation of her name is te-n-o-u, not te-no-u.
(As an aside, her character tag is currently mis-romanized as tenoh_haruka, so I'll request an alias to ten'ou_haruka.)

Simplicity gets my vote.

I'm not particularly convinced that there will be that much naming confusion, considering the relative rarity of names that will require the /ん(vowel)/ distinction. Also, thinking about the frequency such names will be used.

I'll be clear on the opinion that specificity is great. But it's not really a necessity as an official policy.

I vote we keep things as they are, simply because the distinction looks ass ugly and annoys my esthetic eye.

sgcdonmai said:
Example: Ten'ou Haruka, a.k.a. Sailor Uranus. The pronunciation of her name is te-n-o-u, not te-no-u.
(As an aside, her character tag is currently mis-romanized as tenoh_haruka, so I'll request an alias to ten'ou_haruka.)

Actually, it's ten-ou, with "ou" being a single sound (which is important, there's no "u" there, it's just lengthening the preceding "o"). Unless you meant to write "spelling" in the above?

Oh, and my vote is for specifity. Yes, it's work, but I prefer accurate pronunciation hints (with the single exception of keeping ゐ as "wi", and not as its true phonetic equivalent "i").

I would have to vote tags - simple, wiki - pronunciation keys if you want them. We have intentionally avoided things like idolm@ster and this is no less unwieldy.

As I mentioned in the other thread, I would prefer apostrophes for "ん followed by a vowel". It's an important distinction to make in my mind. With that standardized, it is easy to infer what everything romanized on Danbooru would look like in hiragana (well, with the exception of じ vs. ぢ and ず vs. づ, but there's no good way of fixing that...).

I prefer the specificity, even though it is aesthetically displeasing. If it is a pain in the arse to find and fix, that is all the more reason to keep properly track of it in the first place.

葉月 said:
(with the single exception of keeping ゐ as "wi", and not as its true phonetic equivalent "i").

Same thing with を being "wo" instead of "o", too, right?

Oh right, and wo.

That's four for specificity and two for simplicity, with Log kinda more for simple also.

+1 specificity (that's a heck of an ugly word, by the way).

I think it's an important enough distinction and doesn't look "ass ugly" to me.

I vote for specificity...

I cringe at apostrophes used like that because of my studies back when I was still in college (damn you, Wade-Giles), but I'd have to cast my vote for it.

I don't like it from an aesthetic perspective, but I can't find a reason against it other than my personal preference, so... yeah. It might not be used much, but there do exist cases where it clarifies an otherwise potentially iffy situation.

If it brings about a positive effect syntactically, then it should be for the better in the long run.

+1 specific

+1 specificity

I think it's better to avoid punctuation in tags, if possible, since it tends to break things.

For example:
http://danbooru.donmai.us/artist/create?name=xxx'xxx (currently causes a failbooru error.)
http://chan.sankakucomplex.com/tag?name=*%26*%3B* (someone's tag import script adds html escape codes)

These sort of problems will happen anyway, but removing any optional punctuation helps to limit the damage.

So far there hasn't been too much breaking caused by punctuation. We've got tags using colons (some of the Macross titles), emoticons (which utilise punctuation and letters), and for a recent example, the they're_not_panties tag.

Lalaca: Ugh... haphazardly translated memes... *shudder*

Anyway, I'm all for using ' where it is needed. While 葉月 may be all for good pronunciation hints in romanization, I on the other hand am all for good (kana) spelling hints in romanization. On this topic, thankfully, the two agendas concur fully, since に and んい are both spelled and pronounced differently.

Thanks for bringing this up, jxh2154.

Guess we go for the apostrophes then. Visually they're really jarring but they have legitimate uses. Shouldn't be too hard to adjust to.