Orthography
In transliterating the Japanese sounds into the Roman letter, the following system has been adopted in this work:—
| a | has the sound of a in father, arm. |
| e | has the sound of ey in they, prey. |
| i | has the sound of i in machine, pique, or like the sound of e in mete. |
| u | has the long sound of u in rule, tune, or oo in moon, excepting in the syllables tsu, zu, and su, when it has a close sound, resembling, as near as possible, the sound of u pronounced with the vocal organs fixed in the position they are in just after pronouncing the letter s. |
| o | has the sound of o in no, so. The horizontal mark over ō and ū indicates merely that the sound of o and u is prolonged. |
| ai | has the sound of ai in aisle, or like eye. |
| au | has the sound of ow in cow, how. |
| ch | is pronounced like ch in cheek, cheap. |
| sh | is pronounced like sh in shall, ship shop. |
| f | has a close resemblance to the sound of the English f, but differs from it, in that the lower lip does not touch the upper teeth; the sound is made by blowing fu softly through the lips nearly closed, resembling the sound of wh in who: fu is an aspirate, and might, for the sake of uniformity, be written hu. |
| g | in the Tōkyō dialect has the soft sound of ng, but in Kyōto, Nagasaki, and the southern provinces it has the hard sound of g in go, gain. |
| r | in ra, re, ro, ru, has the sound of the English r; but in ri is pronounced more like d. But this is not invariable, as many natives give it the common r sound. |
| se | in Kyoto, Nagasaki and the southern provinces is pronounced she, and ze like je. |
The final n, when at the end of a word, has always the sound of ng; as, mon=mong, san=sang, min=ming; but in the body of a word, when followed by a syllable beginning with b, m or p, it is pronounced like m, as, ban-min=bamming; mon-ban=mombang; shin-pai=shimpai. Before the other consonants it has the sound of n; as, an-nai, bandai, hanjō.
The sounds of the other consonants, viz., b, d, h, j, k, m, n, p, s, t, w, y and z, do not differ from their common English sounds.
The syllables in combination.
The syllables commencing with the soft aspirates h and f, and y, when preceded by another syllable, for the most part lose their consonants, and their vowels combine with the vowel of the preceding syllable, sometimes forming a diphthong; as,
