I enjoyed visiting Tokio (Tokyo) the city and I liked the
"io" suffix and how it plays w/ Mio as well. I don't
know... naming is hard so I didn't spend too much time
thinking about it.
"Tokio" is one way to romanize 東京, the capital of Japan. [1] "Tokyo" is more accurate in a sense, and so is more popular today, but doesn't contain the I/O pun. The logo also references its metropolitan crest. [2].
I edited my post with a link to some history, you might want to check it out. As someone with very limited 日本語 skills, I find this stuff very fascinating. (And yes, un-learning kyo vs kee-ooh was tough...)
Yeah, I think I still say it wrong sometimes. To me, it's a word I learned in English, and so I think of it the English way. In that way, loan-words are troublesome in both English and Japanese for words from both languages.
Don't even get me started about learning French words in either of them and then learning their pronunciation in the other, and then the actual French. As an example, the Atelier game series.
I don't know if it's entirely correct to call it wrong. The nearer a word comes to its equivalent in its source language, the higher the expectation that it's pronounced the same as the source language. This expectation is arguably correct when the word is not commonly used in the host language. Some words are very different. Germany/Deutschland. Florence/Firenze. Some are closer, even having the same spelling: Mexico/Mexico. I don't think it's not wrong per se to pronounce it the way its typically pronounced in the language you're speaking.
shrug, aren't the cues provided by transliteration mostly for the sake of the English speakers (or at least non-Japanese speakers)? If so, the distinction won't matter.
It's not really as far off as you would think, since /j/ and /i/ are the same semivowel. As a single syllable, it's /kjo/ or /k ̯io/. As two syllables, it's /ki.o/.
Sorry, no. Tokyo is not a correct romanization of the metropolis' name. It is rather an exonym.
Romanization is a way of unambigously encoding Japanese into the roman alphabet. One method gives us "toukyou". Another system uses diacritics for long vowels.
"Tokio" is a different word.
tokio -- ときお (to ki o)
toukyou -- とうきょう (tō kyō: this is Tokyo)
tokyo -- ときょ (to kyo)
Note that ō loses an orthographic nuance, since it can denote either おう or おお.
Tokio is also an exonym for 東京 – in many languages other than English. While the spelling overlaps with how 「ときお」 (whatever that means) would be romanized, the author himself told the name got its inspiration from the metropolis of Tokyo.
Edit: By the way, your idea of "unambiguously" encoding Japanese doesn't hold water. Written Japanese is written in a mixture of kanji and kana, and no romanization system does round-trip the kanji. You could say that (good) romanization systems unambiguously encode the pronunciation, but that isn't true either: in addition to the fact that encoding "pronunciation" of written language is problematic in principle, there are the pitch accents that aren't captured by kana. But we're digressing.
If you give up the "unambiguous", "tokyo" is a perfectly good romanization for 東京.
I might have been using "romanization" a bit loosely, thank you. I was taught with Hepburn, IIRC, and was basically taught "hey there's a bunch of ways to do this, and people give them names" not "a way of unambiguously encoding Japanese into the roman alphabet", but am very willing to be wrong here. Thanks for the note.
I understand that your parent may be misusing the word romanization, though the intent of his comment is clear. The name of the capital of Japan (東京) is spelled differently in different languages, Tokyo and Tokio being two of them.
If you're going to be strict with respect to romanization and use accents, isn't the circumflex used to indicate long vowels, at least in Kunrei? So, Tôkyô? Or in Hepburn, the macron? Tōkyō? I've never come across acute being used for this.
Fixed that now. I was being lazy and hadn't noticed that Hacker's Keyboard provides ō, right there in the same long-press menu for o where I had obtained ó.
