While the romaji systems in Japan use r exclusively (as far as I know), some places like France use l over r because of how different the French r sound is. So in Paris they have lamen shops instead of ramen.
You know, I ran across a lamen place in Paris like 20 years ago and just assumed that was how they all did it (like this one, although it’s spelled larmen there for some reason). It made sense to me because the French r sounds nothing like ラ in Japanese. But then again, the English l is a lot closer to ラ than r as well, so I don’t know why they started using r instead of l in all the romaji writing.
I wonder if anything changed in the past 20 years. I know in the US at the time ramen wasn’t nearly as popular, so there probably weren’t as many ramen shops in Paris either. Maybe when it was a newer cultural concept they spelled it more according to sound, but now it’s more popular they don’t have to do that. Or maybe I just happened to run across the one weird ass shop and extrapolated from there.
edit: Here’s another place that has lamen on the name of the restaurant, but on the menu they have “ramen” written one time, whereas in French they just write “soupe de nouilles”. Actually there doesn’t seem to be any Japanese on the menu at all, only Chinese.
I found one other place as well that spells it lamen on the pics of their menus. But it looks like for the most part these days places use ramen.
I stand corrected. You did manage to find three places out of a thousand that have apparently just discovered the latin alphabet and have no real idea how it works.
Now you’re just making stuff up.
You know, I ran across a lamen place in Paris like 20 years ago and just assumed that was how they all did it (like this one, although it’s spelled larmen there for some reason). It made sense to me because the French r sounds nothing like ラ in Japanese. But then again, the English l is a lot closer to ラ than r as well, so I don’t know why they started using r instead of l in all the romaji writing.
I wonder if anything changed in the past 20 years. I know in the US at the time ramen wasn’t nearly as popular, so there probably weren’t as many ramen shops in Paris either. Maybe when it was a newer cultural concept they spelled it more according to sound, but now it’s more popular they don’t have to do that. Or maybe I just happened to run across the one weird ass shop and extrapolated from there.
edit: Here’s another place that has lamen on the name of the restaurant, but on the menu they have “ramen” written one time, whereas in French they just write “soupe de nouilles”. Actually there doesn’t seem to be any Japanese on the menu at all, only Chinese.
I found one other place as well that spells it lamen on the pics of their menus. But it looks like for the most part these days places use ramen.
I stand corrected. You did manage to find three places out of a thousand that have apparently just discovered the latin alphabet and have no real idea how it works.
This is not very typical. But it’s impressive.