About the surname Yos(h)ida

Question

I have recently bumped into the Japanese mathematician 吉田{よしだ}耕筰{こうさく}. I was wondering two things about his surname:

Why is it so often spelt Yosida instead of Yoshida? And taking lead from it, when did し change sound from /si/ to /ɕi/? That is, is it possible that at the time this mathematician was working his name was actually read /Josida/, hence the spelling? Or is it an older scheme of transliteration that stuck for some reason?
Where should I stress Yoshida? /'joɕida/, /jo'ɕida/ or /joɕi'da/? Naturally, the answer to this lies in the Japanese pitch accent, so how is the pitch accent of this particular word?

し is si in the nihonshiki romaji (日本式ローマ字) which tries to keep the romanization of the hiragana table regular, hence why it also maps つ to tu — user11589, Dec 17 '15 at 21:11

Sjiveru · Accepted Answer · 2015-12-18 17:16:50Z

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Spelling conventions are different. It's almost certainly not the case that the pronunciation has changed since then, as evidence suggests that /si/ has been [ɕi] since Old Japanese in the 700s (and also suggests that /se/ was once [ɕe], meaning that the overall direction might well be from [ɕ] to [s] rather than the other way around). Some romanisation systems (such as Hepburn) prefer to represent as accurate a pronunciation as can be conveyed in letters (hence ‹shi›); other systems prefer either internal regularity or 1:1 phoneme-to-letter correspondences (giving ‹si› to be consistent with ‹sa› etc). These days the most common system for names is some variant of Hepburn; this was not always the case in the past (which is likely why your mathematician's name isn't in proper Hepburn).
As for the accent, my (admittedly non-native) gut instinct suggests [jòɕídá] or [jòɕídà] and [kóòsàkù]. Others can correct me.

answered Dec 18 '15 at 1:53

Sjiveru

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Meta question - any way to turn off HTML code interpretation? I can't properly indicate romanisations with angle brackets because it thinks anything inside them is HTML. – Sjiveru Dec 18 '15 at 1:55
How about < and >? – naruto Dec 18 '15 at 3:11
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How about real angle brackets, like ⟨⟩, rather than smaller/greater than signs? – Earthliŋ♦ Dec 18 '15 at 6:53
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Backticks can help there, I think. Like <blah> (blah wrapped in backticks and <>, can't show that as for some reason trying to wrap that in backtick+space makes the <> vanish...). – MickG Dec 18 '15 at 7:16
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meta.ell.stackexchange.com/questions/1306/… – snailboat♦ Dec 18 '15 at 10:38

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sova · Accepted Answer · 2015-12-17 20:26:11Z

0

There is no /si/ in Japanese. /ɕi/ is the valid reading of し

し is romanized as SI and SHI, but it is always pronounced SHI (ɕi).

answered Dec 17 '15 at 20:26

sova

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That is such a non-standard way of pronouncing 吉田. – l'électeur Dec 18 '15 at 1:53
would you stress the Shi? – sova Dec 18 '15 at 3:04
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@sova 普通は「[よしだ]{LHH}」「[こうさく]{LHHH}」「[よしだこうさく]{LHHHHHH}」って感じになると思います。 – Chocolate♦ Dec 18 '15 at 5:59

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