A question about rōmaji: Is it more common to use ī or ii? For loanwords, it
seems to be common to use ī, e.g.

```

    コーヒー　　kōhī
    アンチーク　antīku
    
```

For other words, using ii seems more common, e.g.

```

    涼しい　suzushii
    大きい　ōkii
    小さい　chiisai
    
```

Google translator shows suzushī, ōkī and chīsai, though. (I know, results from
Google translator are usually poor, but still.)

Similar question: I believe 湖 is actually mizu+umi (right?), so the natural
romanization would seem to be mizuumi rather than mizūmi, but I think the
latter is more common?
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2018-08-05T05:47:33.127
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2018-08-05T06:39:31.263
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question
rōmaji
Is ii or ī more common in rōmaji?
One basic rule (or perhaps "convention" might be a better word) for
determining romanized spellings, is whether two identical vowel sounds -- such
as _i_ + _i_ , or _u_ + _u_ , belong to the same morphophonemic unit. In more
common parlance, whether the two sounds belong to the same root or stem.

For adjectives that end in two _i_ sounds, the last _i_ is usually the
conjugating portion -- this is the _i_ that changes to _ku_ in the adverbial
form, like すず[し]{●}[い]{●} as an adjective changes to すず[し]{●}[く]{●} as an
adverb. Since the final _i_ belongs to a separate functional piece of the
word, romanization practices generally keep this separate -- so すずしい = _suzush
**ii**_ with the two _i_ 's spelled separately.

Likewise, みずうみ "lake" derives from 水 + 海, and the two _u_ sounds belong to
different roots. So this is similarly spelled spearately -- みずうみ = _miz **uu**
mi_ with the two _u_ 's spelled separately.

However, in おにいさん, the two _i_ 's are part of the same root. Some romanization
systems spell this as _on **ī** san_ as a result. Likewise with borrowed terms
like コーヒー: the two _i_ 's are part of the same root, and these are thus
generally spelled together as **ī** as a result.

Other romanization systems spell *all* double- _i_ 's separately, sometimes
out of a stated concern that the macron (the long bar) over the **ī** is too
hard to distinguish visually from the tittle (dot) over the regular **i**.

There are multiple systems for romanizing Japanese, as Virmaior points to in
his comment. Some of the main ones are [Kunrei-
shiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunrei-shiki_romanization) in Japan, and
[Hepburn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepburn_romanization), which is
commonly used in English-language materials about Japanese. More at the
Wikipedia article on [Romanization of
Japanese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese).
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answer