| abstract | - I'm not sure how "contentious" this is, but I'm not sure where else it would go. I've noticed that while Kokujō Tengen Myō'ō has an apostrophe separating the two ō's, Kikōō (the phoenix from the Sōkyoku) does not. Is there a reason behind this?--Xilinoc (talk) 05:02, November 23, 2013 (UTC) Nope XD. This is just an artificial device used by some romanizers to a) as here, separate identical phonemes (like the two ōs) for aesthetic/legibility reasons, or b) to distinguish one phoneme from another phoneme, which would otherwise look identical in romanization. An example of the latter would be, say, the Japanese masculine name Kenichi. Often times, a name of this sort will be *rextra*-romanized as Ken'ichi to show that the (underlying) hiragana spelling would be KE-N-I-CHI, with the centre two kana being the (syllable/mora-final) nasal (-)n (ん) and the vowel i (い), rather than KE-NI-CHI, where the central kana is now the single syllable/mora ni (に). This is apparently to aid in pronunciation/spelling-understanding, but I don't like it, its artificiality, or its (IMO) lack of necessity. I say, just remember it's usually Ken-i, not Ke-ni, kids! I don't know if the Wiki has an official policy about it either way, though. Hmm... If it were up to me, we'd spell all the native Japanese "long vowels" correctly, e.g. oo, ou, uu, and leave usage of the macronized ones for slang, dialectal, and adapted-from-non-Japanese words when these were expressed by the long mark (ー), which I think the macron emulates/transliterates nicely. Adam Restling (talk) 09:59, November 28, 2013 (UTC) I'm not sure how "contentious" this is, but I'm not sure where else it would go. I've noticed that while Kokujō Tengen Myō'ō has an apostrophe separating the two ō's, Kikōō (the phoenix from the Sōkyoku) does not. Is there a reason behind this?--Xilinoc (talk) 05:02, November 23, 2013 (UTC) Nope XD. This is just an artificial device used by some romanizers to a) as here, separate identical phonemes (like the two ōs) for aesthetic/legibility reasons, or b) to distinguish one phoneme from another phoneme, which would otherwise look identical in romanization. An example of the latter would be, say, the Japanese masculine name Kenichi. Often times, a name of this sort will be *rextra*-romanized as Ken'ichi to show that the (underlying) hiragana spelling would be KE-N-I-CHI, with the centre two kana being the (syllable/mora-final) nasal (-)n (ん) and the vowel i (い), rather than KE-NI-CHI, where the central kana is now the single syllable/mora ni (に). This is apparently to aid in pronunciation/spelling-understanding, but I don't like it, its artificiality, or its (IMO) lack of necessity. I say, just remember it's usually Ken-i, not Ke-ni, kids! I don't know if the Wiki has an official policy about it either way, though. Hmm... If it were up to me, we'd spell all the native Japanese "long vowels" correctly, e.g. oo, ou, uu, and leave usage of the macronized ones for slang, dialectal, and adapted-from-non-Japanese words when these were expressed by the long mark (ー), which I think the macron emulates/transliterates nicely. Adam Restling (talk) 09:59, November 28, 2013 (UTC)
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