0

Here is a shot of the title screen for the music anime Kono Oto Tomare! :

title shot of anime, Kono Oto Tomare!

Note the line of Latin-alphabet letters at the bottom. The Funimation English overlay at the top shows three words, yet the bottom text is spaced as if it is seven words. My guess is that the top is correct, which leads me to wonder about the bottom. I can think of three possibilities:

  1. The bottom is simply breaking up the Japanese on a letter-by-letter basis as purely a stylistic choice.
  2. The bottom is the syllablized form to help westerners with pronunciation. (Like I do trying to convince a friend the word is pronounced "sub scribe" not "sus cribe". )
  3. The bottom is actually accurate but Funimation just squeezed it together.
RichF
  • 3,134
  • 3
  • 20
  • 42

1 Answers1

3

The Romanized form would be Kono Oto Tomare! What you see is correct.

The Japanese language does not require that sentences contain spaces except if the sentence comprises only of Hiragana and Katakana, which at that point it becomes optional for clarity or to disambiguate what's being said.

The likely explanation as to why it's stylized in that way is for stylistic purposes, or to give an indication as to what each individual character was in terms of pronunciation.

Makoto
  • 6,823
  • 4
  • 29
  • 58