Hi Mike, (and others :-))
AM> It means that transliteration scripts are not native to the
AM> language. Perhaps I am hypersensitive to this, having had pinyin forced
AM> down my throat by an overzealous teacher (I am among those who find it to be
AM> as much hindrance as help), but I think that there is a certain mentality
AM> extant that it is acceptable to use transliteration instead of a language's
AM> native script; I consider this mentality to be simply wrong, and feel that
AM> listing transliteration scripts for languages would give undue
AM> respectability to using transliteration scripts, especially given that
AM> Unicode removes the need for most transliteration scripts.
This is not quite true. In fact, in the academic community (or at
least in linguistics & cultural sciences) it is established practice
to transliterate some terms. In a sinologist's work on Mao he'll
probably write Mao as "Mao" instead of using the glyph. In an Islamic
Studies researcher's work on the Prophet's sayings, he's going to
write "hadith" instead of using the Arabic script equivalent.
It's not that people started transliterating because there was no
technical solution to typesetting foreign text. This is a very common
misassumption because it has been easier to use transliteration
scripts in computers for the last ten to twenty years or so. For
Arabic, for example, print has been in existence for well over four
hundred years, and mixed-script printed works have coexisted with
wholly transliterated ones since the beginning of scientific activity
in the field. It is just that transliteration has different uses from
the original script, and as such it has its own right of existence,
even though Unicode has made it a bit easier to process the foreign
script "at home".
Greetings
Philipp mailto:uzsv2k@uni-bonn.de
__________________________
No keyboard present / Hit F1 to continue / Zen engineering
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