Kanjis to Romajis first letter [closed]

Question

I'm fond of Unicode and what romanization attempts. My goal is to get a first latin char (for sorting purposes) of a non-latin character - so far I succeeded by transcribing Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Katakana, Hiragana, Hangul (including all its syllables), Berber, Thai and Arabic letters by assigning the most appropriate starting letter to each case.

I also know that multiple systems for transliterations and transcribings (and romanization) exist - so far their differences are almost irrelevant for my needs. I'm not fond of Japanese itself - at most I might be able to recognize English terms written in Katakanas.

My problem is: how to assign Unicode code points U+4E00 thru U+9FFF by algorithm? For Hangul syllables this is quite easy: U+AC00 thru U+B097 => K (as all of them start with that); U+B098 thru B2E3 => N. I've looked at JS solutions like https://github.com/hexenq/kuroshiro/ and https://github.com/WaniKani/WanaKana/, but I only find the code for processing Hiraganas and Katakanas (which I already got), never Kanjis (although all of their demos succeed in processing them).

Is there a table or dictionary? If romanization of Kanjis is achieved thru first converting each Kanji into Katakanas, then how to achieve that?

Answer 1

EDIT: It turned out that OP did not know most kanji have multiple readings in Japanese. He is actually trying to get the reading of words (e.g., 生地 → K, 生卵 → N, 生命 → S, 生霊 → I). For this purpose, a word-based dictionary is needed. There are several open source morphological analyzers that can do the job and more (kuromoji, mecab, Kagome, etc). See also: Is it possible to algorithmically convert Japanese text to Romaji?

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Original Answer

CJK unified ideographs are sorted based on radicals, not readings. This is because it's impossible to determine the reading of those characters in one way. The Unicode Consortium provides Unihan Database, which can display the representative readings of CJK ideographs written in simple Latin alphabet. For example, here is the result for a very basic ideograph 日 (U+65E5; "day", "date", "sun", etc):

The table says the "first roman letter of 日" is J in Cantonese, R in Mandarin, H-or-K-or-N-or-J in Japanese and I in Korean. To understand what's going on here, please keep in mind that the 'CJK Unified Ideographs' block has characters used in Chinese, Korean and Japanese jumbled together. Each character is read differently in different languages. Especially in Japanese, one character can have many readings depending on the context. To make matters worse, there are some characters whose readings are totally unknown. If you can accept all those limitations and still want the Latin readings anyway, go ahead and use the database according to your needs. If you're only interested in Japanese kanji, a reasonable method would be to pick the first letter of the kJapaneseOn field (or the first letter of kJapaneseKun if there is no kJapaneseOn).