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Does the pronunciation differ significantly from Hepburn Romanization? Honestly, I can't read his handwriting, so it's hard to tell.

I sympathise with his emotions: "What a beastly labour of hand & back bending, besides mental toil & anxiety"

I'm currently working on a machine translator for Chinese dialects, including traditional & simplified characters, pinyin, bopomofo, literal English translation using a dictionary, and parallel English text. I'm adding Taiwanese and Cantonese dialects now, with their own romanisations. I'll publish it here on Hacker News when my friend finally translates the documentation.

https://pingtype.github.io



Not significantly, but in the Hiragana page there are some interesting differences from standard Romanization.

Most notable one is conflation of vowel [イ] and [エ]. Often both are denoted with "i", sometimes one of them is "yi". In modern American English the sound /i/ falls in middle of Japanese イ and エ. I'm not sure in this case that it's because of that, or Ryukyu dialect had shifted vowels.

セ is denoted as "she" (usually "se"). This variation of consonant appears in some Japanese dialect.

ヒ is denoted as "fi". Might stem from old Japanese pronunciation.

Curiously, ヰ is denoted as "i" and ヱ is denoted as "yi/ye/e". Usually they are "wi" and "we", but those pronunciations have been lost in modern Japanese.




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