A quantitative approach to practical transcription of Japanese names into Ukrainian

Abstract This study introduces a quantitative phonetic distance metric to evaluate and improve the practical transcription of Japanese names into Ukrainian. We argue for a standardization of Japanese–Ukrainian transcription grounded in objective phonetic similarity, while also proposing a phonetic-phonemic model that accounts for coarticulation effects in Japanese. By applying a metric method grounded in articulatory phonetics, this work identifies the closest phoneme pairs between Japanese and Ukrainian and assesses their alignment in several established transcription systems. Special attention is given to Japanese palatalized consonants such as [ɕ], [ʑ], and [t͡ɕ], which correspond more accurately to Ukrainian soft alveolar phonemes [sʲ], [zʲ], and [t͡sʲ] than to their post-alveolar counterparts. The results reveal that the modified Fedoryshyn system – replacing the Ukrainian letter “ґ” (“g”) with “г” (“gh”) – most closely aligns with both phonetic and phonological principles of the Ukrainian language. Statistical frequency data from the Ukrainian language corpus further support these findings. The metric method used here provides a replicable framework that can be extended to other language pairs and transcription contexts. This approach enhances linguistic precision and supports the development of consistent, phonetically accurate, and computationally useful transcription systems.