Actually, writing loanwords in their original orthography was part of standard Nippon-shiki rōmaji. Maths textbooks in the post-war rōmaji education experiment, for example, used 'Vektor' rather than 'bekutâ'. It's no more 'strange' than the alternative: english spells 'spaghetti', 'weltanschauung' (rather than 'spagetty', 'veltunshoughing'); japanese spells 普通 (rather than フツー).

(N.-S. R. also prescribed 'wo' for を, incidentally. The label text fails to be consistent, though: it stops capitalising nouns after the first line, and drops diacritics in favor of wāpuro-style 'ou'.)

So although the label text's adherence to N.-S. R. is too haphazard to look intentional on the part of the copywriter, I think there might a layer of faded primary-school memories involved in the process.

I'm just happy to see that the English words are all properly spelled; it really gets on my tits when a business goes to the trouble of writing something in English and the spelling is horrendous. But then again the average westerner sporting a Kanji tattoo wouldn't know if every stroke is in place, or even what the hell it really means.
On the subject of katakana though, I'm looking to expand the technology by adding a "th" sound to the lexicon. How about タ行 with　゜?

Well this is indeed a special case and now I want to try the product, could you perchance inform us which コンビニ you purchased it from?

Actually, writing loanwords in their original orthography was part of standard Nippon-shiki rōmaj

Very interesting.

So, let's follow this more-informed observation: old-style romaji copy as a way to reflect an "old" European drink. All-english seems like a flashy 60s America-worshipping thing, where this style of romanization has more of a Europe-focused appeal, maybe?

It's no more 'strange' than the alternative:

Well, Japanese does have a system for turning foreign words into an entirely different alphabet, which English does not.

could you perchance inform us which コンビニ you purchased it from?

7/11

How about タ行 with ゜

This is awesome.

Hi Marxy, sorry to bother and sorry for posting where I shouldn't but... I found something on your blog that I'm very interested in asking you about:
quote: "Most of Doravideo's footage is copyrighted material, so they can't sell their DVD on the open market. But they might just throw a disc in for free if you buy an (overpriced!) 2000 yen sticker."
Now - where do I get this sticker?? I saw/listened to Doravideo for the first time in June at Sònar in Barcelona, Spain, and I went completely out of my mind: I've been searching on the internet for links, sites, and anything that could tell me about him and possibly try to get a dvd or videos however. Could you PLEASE help me?
Thanks a lot for your attention and patience, and... sorry again :)
Gaia

My guess is to write to these guys: info@macaronirecords.com

You might want to contact Ichiraku himself (Mr Doravideo):

dr.ichiraku@mac.com

is made from adding egg yolk, sugar, and vanilla essence to milk.

This sounds a lot like eggnog. Does it taste like that?

It tastes like a classy vanilla milk.

this style of romanization has more of a Europe-focused appeal, maybe?
I wouldn't go that far. If anything, Nippon-shiki has an even mustier, early-Shōwa feel -- and used to carry rightist/nationalist stigma after the war.
Anyway, bakeries all over Japan have a better way of sounding European when they want to: spectacularly broken (or, in classier depāto, correct) french. (I have a hypothesis for why they chose to write "French Milk" in english rather than french, but I'll stop being boring now.)

For a guy who calls himself "-" you sure know a lot about letters!

(or girl, whoops.)

(I have a hypothesis for why they chose to write "French Milk" in english rather than french, but I'll stop being boring now.)

This is a bit of a tease, don't you think?

If anything, Nippon-shiki has an even mustier, early-Shōwa feel -- and used to carry rightist/nationalist stigma after the war.

Yeah, but the milk seeki/french seeki is an old-school early-Showa drink (wait - how did you do that macron?!) that you would drink at Shibuya Lion, for example, which was built in 昭和元年 if I am not mistaken. I think we are on to something...

Not only is it very cool (from Ishikawa Takuboku to Jap magazine) but romaji-japanese in all it's flexibility shows japanese language's potential to leave it all behind and do a deluzian becomming-indonesian.

(Thank you all so much for your help on Doravideo :))))

a deluzian becomming-indonesian.

I had a Deluzian Sundae last week at Baskin Robbins.

Mac OS X lets you add ˆ's while using a US English keyboard by pressing option-i then the vowel you want, but to get true macrons, you have to copy and paste, which I think is sad.

How about タ行 with ゜

I have previously thought about how nice it would be if they would add marus and ten-tens to the ラ行 to stand for l and r respectively, but it'll never happen. Another nice thing which you see in katakanaized Korean but never katakanaized English is small ムs etc. to indicate that the u in ム is silent and the sound appended to the syllable before (ie. to create kimchi instead of kimuchi).

Of course, what would truly be nice would be teaching students how to read the 発音記号 in their dictionaries, but fat chance that. I actually tried it with some students one time. I don't know if they learned anything from it, but I sure did.

carl, in defense of the lack of R, L distinction, katakana isn't a system for writing English. If they were to formulate some means of writing it, whose R should they go with? English R is nearly as wrong in every other language as ラ is.

There's likewise no hurry to be able to write umlauted German vowels or the swahili clicky thing.

Carl said: "what would truly be nice would be teaching students how to read the 発音記号 in their dictionaries, but fat chance that. I actually tried it with some students one time. I don't know if they learned anything from it, but I sure did."

Yeah, I've never met anyone under 50 in this country who uses the pronunciation symbols. What's strange is that there are some in the 和英　dictionary that are different than the ones I learned in elementary school. Maybe British version? Long vowel sounds for instance...

But back to the subject of Engrish, here's my favorite cigarette machine quote:
"I feel a piece of cigarette very gentle, when I feel easy at home after the daily work."
I love it when you can sorta imagine the Japanese sentence by reverse-engineering. I don't know about feeling a piece of cigarette, there was an old guy in my hometown who used to "feel piece of cigarette" off the street around the bus station and smoke em...

OK I cant find this product anywhere. I've tried just about every conbini and it seems to have come an gone quite quickly.

I think that this can all be explained in terms of mimesis.

Let me refer you to my thesis:

http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/~smith/thesis.pdf

and note mis-quoted Saussure but it more or less makes sense anyway.