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I was reading different hiragana charts and saw that "ち(chi)", applying
dakuten it can be read as "dzi" or "ji".

Other hiragana words in dakuten also have different ways of pronunciation
depending on the charts. How does romaji works on dakuten?

As an example, I'm writing the word "ぢめん" on romaji, how do I write it?
Dzimen? Jimen? Djimen?

Thanks!
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2018-10-10T11:31:20.363
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2018-10-10T14:17:04.210
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question
pronunciation rōmaji
How Dakuten works with Romaji?
This is not a problem of dakuten in general, but is a problem specific to じ,
ぢ, ず and づ. There is a bit complicated history regarding the pronunciations of
these four characters, and they even have a special name, _yotsugana_. English
Wikipedia has [a dedicated article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yotsugana)
about this topic.

In short, the standard Japanese accent no longer retains the distinction
between the sounds of じ vs ぢ, or ず vs づ. You can pronounce じ and ぢ either like
dzi or like ji, and native Japanese speakers using the standard accent cannot
even hear the difference. Please see [this
answer](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/9333/5010) and [this
question](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/1254/5010) for details.

Even though じ and ぢ share the same pronunciation, sometimes you want to
distinguish the spelling of these two characters using Latin alphabet. Some
romanization systems including [日本式](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihon-
shiki_romanization#Nipponsiki%E2%80%94ISO_3602_Strict) distinguish the romaji
spelling of じ (`zi`) and ぢ (`di`). [Hepburn
system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepburn_romanization#Romanization_charts),
which tries to approximate the sound as much as possible, does not distinguish
the spelling of じ/ぢ (both `ji`), or ず/づ (both `zu`). If you want to write 地面
using the Hepburn system, it's "jimen".
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