Talk:Japanese radiotelephony alphabet

rusui mistranslation
The Japanese word rusui, appearing in rusui no ru, does not mean absence. Absence is rusu. Rusui, an old form of rusuban, is a person who keeps somebody's house during his absence. Well, you know I'm so poor in English and I don't know the correct English word for rusui, please somebody fix this error. Rija 17:09, 25 February 2007 (UTC)


 * 'house-sitter', the analog of 'baby-sitter'. JohndanR (talk) 15:52, 27 January 2013 (UTC)


 * There is a Japanese wikipedia article for ja:留守居, if someone wants a small translation project. Neier 22:20, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Japanese symbols do not appear in the charts
English readers who do not have Japanese fonts installed in their computers cannot see the Japanese symbols in these charts. Instead, they only see question marks (i.e. ??????). This problem could be resolved by eliminating the need for Japanese fonts in the charts. Instead of requiring a special font, jpeg pictures of each symbol can be inserted where appropriate, or else the entire chart can be converted to a single large jpeg graphical picture.

Since non-Japanese speaking readers are unlikely to have those necessary Japanese fonts pre-installed in their computers, this page will remain almost useless until a change is made. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.145.25.7 (talk) 22:04, 3 April 2008 (UTC)


 * I expect that problem to shrink every year, as Unicode fonts increasingly come preinstalled.
 * I often copy Japanese characters from Wikipedia into TextEdit that lets me blow them up and see them clearly enough to count their strokes. I couldn't do that as effectively if we used images. —Tamfang (talk) 20:10, 2 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Later I used a Firefox extension “Identify Characters” … but a Firefox update broke that :( —Tamfang (talk) 22:03, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

Little tsu?
How you say little tsu (っ) in this spelling alphabet? It is needed for doubling of consonants. --juhtolv (talk) 16:51, 19 July 2010 (UTC)
 * The character is called a sokuon. Don’t know how it’s represented in this system, though. Maybe just by name? —Frungi (talk) 06:52, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

the obsolescent w-letters
かぎのあるヱ (Kagi no aru "(w)e") is a unique form. Does it mean something like "the /e/ that looks like a key"? —Tamfang (talk) 20:06, 2 April 2014 (UTC)


 * I'd like to know this too. Also 'n' has "oshimai", what's that about? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.72.186.125 (talk) 05:18, 24 June 2020 (UTC)

かぎのあるヱ means "e with a hook", since the character ヱ is basically the character エ with a hook at the end of the first stroke. Oshimai means "ending" so "oshimai no n" means "ending n". I believe this refers to the fact that ん comes at the end of the gojuu'on, but it could also refer to the fact that ん is the only letter to come at the end of a syllable.

Not phonetic, not an alphabet
Kwamikagami boldly moved this article from Japanese phonetic alphabet to its current name back in 2015, stating "not a phonetic alphabet", but if you think about it, it's not an alphabet either―it's a syllabary. It would be nice to find a common or English translation of 和文通話表, but I couldn't even find the English translation of 無線局運用規則 ("Regulation for Operation of Radio Stations"), the ordinance that prescribes this syllabary. Perhaps the optimal name for this article is simply Wabun tsūwa hyō. Nardog (talk) 04:03, 8 February 2018 (UTC)