Now I don't know how accurate or matching the wiki is to the actual game or betas, since I haven't played them. But a particular thing Humankind does with their default city names are the use of diacritics and spellings that are close to resemble their native languages. I find them pretty great. Even commonly known city names get the diacritic treatment.

Tenochtitlan -> Tenōchtitlan

Shanghai -> Shànghǎi

Nuremburg -> Nürnberg 

However, we then get to the Edo Japanese and Japanese city names.....

Tokyo?

Kyoto?

Osaka?

Kobe?

This is the part that I found it weird, and I'm making this thread because I was wondering if this caught others' attention. Now I'm aware this can be seen as very minor due to literally only a few cities being the problem, but I thought it can be fixed quickly, considering it might be something the developers forgot or such. I'm proposing at least these cities are changed to include the long vowel macrons commonly seen within the Hepburn romanization of their names.

Tokyo -> Tōkyō

Kyoto -> Kyōto

Osaka -> Ōsaka

Kobe -> Kōbe

And a few others I may have missed?

There is also the possibility of using the Kunrei-Shiki/Nihon-Shiki Circumflex instead, as seen in some spellings where Tokyo becomes "Tôkyô". But anyways, I just wanted to point out an out-of-place part that the developers overlooked with the city names.

Or hey, maybe even spell out the kana syllables out themselves, getting “Toukyou”, “Kyouto”, “Oosaka”, or "Koube" instead.

OK, but Amplitude already decided to use western-devised transliteration scripts for nearly every other culture, so the lack of diacritical marks in the Japanese names stands out. Frankly, it doesn't really matter if Japanese people use the Hepburn system because we're talking about the English localization.

Besides, I'm not convinced that a Japanese-derived script would be better for transliteration anyway. The whole point of transliteration is to help non-native speakers read and pronounce foreign words. The transliteration has to make sense to the foreign speakers, not to the native speakers. Pinyin is difficult for English speakers to use because so many of the letters don't sound the way that we would expect them to. The Hepburn system of transliterating Japanese isn't perfect, but it's far better than the system that the Japanese government came up with. Ever been to Mt. Huzi?

Niallism wrote:

I'm just copy pasting my reply from the Reddit thread that I believe started this discussion:

The diacritics aren't always used. They are contested, basically. Mostly through apathy, and lack of knowledge, but that's on the part of Japanese people, who obviously largely define how Japanese names 'should' be written. Westerners who've learned Japanese in an academic setting vastly overestimate their ubiquity and importance.

They're also pain in the ass to type. I use the Japanese IME every day, but I don't know how to do the diacritics. Lots of Japanese people - I would guess most - don't even know about diacritics. So while some highly official signage such as the ones in Tokyo station use diacritics, most people would use Tokyo or even Toukyou in emails and their life, if using romaji.

I would guess that almost all Japanese speakers think it's written 東京 and that the romaji is unimportant. For example, many people whose name is 真一 might write their name as Sinichi, or Sin'ichi, and be bemused at best by someone insisting it ought to be Shinichi.

I'd not thought about it before this question, but when I look at the 'Hepburn' system and compare it to, for example, Pinyin, the name jumps right out. Pinyin was made by Chinese people, and many of them follow the rules and care about it, because it's theirs. Hepburn was made by a westerner, and most Japanese people don't know or care about it.

So let's not castigate Amplitude for not implementing a roman alphabet transliteration made by a white guy over 100 years ago, that hardly any Japanese people even know how to use.

Alright, thx for the explanation. I can understand the possible reason a bit more now.

Also hey, I do remember this comment on Reddit. Also saw it on there.