[Freeciv-Dev] (PR#13664) On the romanization of Japanese names

["Jason Short" <jdorje@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

<URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=13664 >

> [himasaram@xxxxxxxx - Sat Aug 13 13:18:41 2005]:

> Why do we have to stick to plain ascii when we have unicode? Why are 
> accented latin characters unnecessary when they are frequently used in, 
> in particular, Scandinavian and many other North European nations (e.g. 
> German, Polish etc). I never requested Japanese names to be written in 
> Japanese (THAT would be overkill), I just wanted Japanese names to be 
> written in correct Hepburn romanization (including the macrons). Try it 
> out in the game; In my opinion the macrons look pretty nice and I doubt 
> they make it more difficult to read the names.

My reasoning is that since we are transliterating from Hiragana anyway,
we might as well transliterate into ascii.  By comparison, the names for
European nations' cities are (or should) be generally written in their
native language, using their native alphabet (extended Latin alphabet).
 If we were to transliterate them we would put them directly into ascii
as well (which is what we used to do).

Also I'm biased since I've never seen this accented Hepburn
transliteration before, and I don't see what purpose it could serve. 
Even with ascii there is no possibility for confusion, so what purpose
do the accents serve?

-jason