> From: Philipp Reichmuth [mailto:uzsv2k@uni-bonn.de]
> 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.
That's nice, but the academic community is writing about the
language, not in the language, which is not the same thing. This gets
discussed exquisitely in Douglas Hofstatder's /Gödel, Escher, Bach/, but I
prefer the succinct treatment it gets in Lewis Carrol's "The Name of the
Song"[1] (from /Alice in Wonderland/, I believe).
> 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".
That's all fine and well, but academic writings on a language are
not the same as common writings in a language. I don't think we're setting
up a page for people who want to know what scripts are used to publish
academic papers about a given language.
/|/|ike
[1] - which is probably not the name of the story, but it is what the name
of the story is called.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Wed Aug 15 2001 - 15:31:10 EDT