The Wikipedia article in my native language about "kanban" states that how we write it is based on a "wrong" English transcription of the word and it should actually be "kamban".
Would you agree? We had a little debate about this, and I have even checked how japanese people pronounce that. The conclusion is, it definitely depends on the speaker – if lips are connected, the sound is similar to /m/, but in some videos where the speaker's face is visible, we can see their teeth when they produce the sound. Meaning it cannot be /m/ in such cases.
I'm not a speech transcription expert by far, but for me it seems like because of the way they pronounce ん we could also transcribe it as /ɲ/, even when it's before a mora that begins with the "b" sound.
In the end, I was highly against ever romanizing ん as "m" to avoid confusion and to follow the Occam's razor principle, but today I've seen someone write "gambatte", so the question is up again.
What's your opinion on this? Is "kombanwa" for こんばんは acceptable for you then, since that's how some people actually pronounce the word?
More to this, when adopting a japanese word to another language (given, nasal sounds are not distincted in it), would you prefer deciding between "n" and "m" on a case-by-case basis, or just agree that using "n" as the way of romanizing the mora ん is universal enough? So when we import "kanban" as the term for "scheduling system for lean manufacturing", should we consider pronunciation or writing? In English we can't write "n" and say "m" so does it mean that "kamban" is the right way?
by HuntOut