Re: Looking for transcription or transliteration standards latin- >arabic

From: Mark Davis (mark.davis@jtcsv.com)
Date: Fri Jul 02 2004 - 13:08:42 CDT

  • Next message: Jony Rosenne: "RE: Looking for transcription or transliteration standards latin- >arabic"

    RE: Looking for transcription or transliteration standards latin->arabicIn that case, we'd call it a transcription, since it doesn't roundtrip from source to target back to source. It is actually quite common for style guides for non-academic publications to have a restricted list of characters and character + accent combinations, and convert all others. For example, the Economist style guide, as I recall, recommends keeping accents in French, German, Italian, and Spanish names and words, but dropping them otherwise; and converting characters like þ and ð to nearest equivalents, "th".

    Note that the latter loses information in two ways; the obvious one is that the distinction between þ and ð are lost; the less obvious one is that the distinction between them and a *real* 't' followed by 'h' in the source is lost. So that loses the distinction in sounds between 'th' in 'cathode' and 'cathouse', as well as between 'thy' and 'thigh'.

    Μаrk
      ----- Original Message -----
      From: Mike Ayers
      To: 'Mark Davis' ; unicode@unicode.org
      Sent: Friday, July 02, 2004 10:24
      Subject: RE: Looking for transcription or transliteration standards latin- >arabic

    > From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]On
    > Behalf Of Mark Davis
    > Sent: Friday, July 02, 2004 8:36 AM

    > Note: I am still speaking of transliterations (e.g.
    > transformations that
    > 'roundtrip'), not transcriptions (which try to match the
    > pronunciation more
    > precisely, and may lose information).

              OK, just because I do so love monkey wrenches, please explain what I found in my atlas:

              Vietnamese English
                        ------>
              Hà Tĩnh Ha Tinh

              In which we have a trancription/transliteration/taxonomy problem between Latin and Latin. Since this does not remotely roundtrip (Ha, for instance, has 18 Vietnamese equivalents), and no attempt is made to match pronunciation, how do we refer to it?

      /|/|ike

      Trivia question: Which Vietnamese city does my atlas spell correctly, much to the chagrin of the Vietnamese?

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