From: Chris Harvey (chris@languagegeek.com)
Date: Fri Jul 02 2004 - 13:17:19 CDT
> 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?
Perhaps one could think of "Ha Tinh" as the English word for the city, like "Rome" (English) for "Roma" (Italian), or Tokyo (English) for "Tōkyō" (English transliteration of Japanese), or Kahnawake (English/French) for Kahnawà:ke (Mohawk). In these and many other cases, place-names as used in foreign languages sould not be considered tranliterations, but linguistic borrowings, where pronunciation and spelling are often changed in the new language.
On the other hand, maybe "Ha Tinh" is just lazy typography.
Chris Harvey
languagegeek.com
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