Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-917693-20130113232228/@comment-5290733-20130114000357

About Nata de Cocoline

I googled "Nata de coco" and found wikipedia

"Nata de coco comes from Spanish "cream of coconut". Cream in this sense means the fat from the coconut milk. The Spanish name is a result of Spain's colonization of the Philippines."

so it's a word of Spanish origin, so I figured the best way to romanize it would be too take a somewhat western approach to the spelling if no official romanization is given. So "line" instead of "riinu" seemed the best option to me.

Utaite with differences between their personal romanization and our standard romanization include vipTenchou (tentyo) and Choumiryou (tyomiro or something) which simply use a different romanisation system. I I deduced after I joined that if the difference between "utaite's emai/twitter name" and our name is only a matter of romanisation ((I think we use standard Tokyo) then we would switch it to Tokyo romanisation.

I think I was unclear about Mainan. I don't know if you type in Japanese often and know this already, but anyway, to type in まいなん you type in m-a-i-n-a-n-n in order to get the ん at the end. Thus she may have just wanted her name to be like that because she us used to typing double n's at the end of her name. Even though it's not strictly a romanisation difference, it's simply what she literally types in to get her name. So it may not qualify as a personal romanisation.

Someone like Cocolu is a wholly different case because "cocolu" is not the romanisation of ココル in any system so her name is a personal romanisation.

Kind of off topic: There are several utaite with づ in their names (Kazukin, Hazuki Yuu, Hizuki). According to standard Tokyo romanisation, it is to be written "du". This is not how it is pronounced but it is how it is types. I personally think it's pretty ugly and some people also use "dzu" which is closer to the sound. From a phonological point of view it is pronounced sometimes "dzu" and sometimes "zu" (which is mostly what we use but there are exceptions) so which one should we use? Using "zu" may be misleading because if you type in "zu" you will never get づ.

Sorry for the long response.