How would one go about romanizing Aynu Itak?


I've been casually studying Itak on and off in between my usual schoolwork and
obvious Japanese studies. However, I've been more and more bothered by a
particular issue as I've gone on: how does one go about romanizing Itak from
standard katakana?

I'm aware that [this
site](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_language#Special_katakana_for_the_Ainu_language)
boasts a small guide, but that doesn't really work too well when the
[dictionary](http://www.h3.dion.ne.jp/~oyama/boukenn-folder/bouken-ainugo-
ziten.htm) you're using doesn't follow those rules. I'm not sure if a standard
guide even exists, but less how to go about transliterating this language to
English characters. I've seen odd ones where people will write a name like
"cup=kamuy", when I'll see others write as "Chupkamui". There are probably a
ton of variations like with Japanese as well, but I lack the understanding of
which ones are standard, which are more widely understood, and which are
better to use overall.

Any and all advice one has on this will be taken into account and greatly
appreciated. If further clarification is needed, feel free to ask. Thank you
for reading this.




I'm not sure that there is a good standard, but it may or may not matter,
given the relatively tiny audience there is for any such transliterated
material. Anna Bugaeva is one person who's written a good deal of scientific
papers in English about Aynu, and you might use her transliteration as a
starting point.

Personally, I just transcribe it however seems best to me, which generally
involves making it look as much like a language people actually use as I can -
I throw out the equals sign entirely (since anywhere else that's just a
technical notation for clitic attachment), and I tend to use ch and y for
others' c and i. I'd love to see a kanji/hiragana orthography for Aynu, since
the katakana one looks so much more like a scientific transcription than a
language someone actually speaks, but that's not an easy thing to do.

In short, figure out how it actually sounds and romanise it however you like,
but feel free to use the existing scientific literature as a guide if you
want.

