From: Mike Ayers (mike.ayers@tumbleweed.com)
Date: Fri Jul 02 2004 - 15:53:23 CDT
> From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]On
> Behalf Of Chris Harvey
> Sent: Friday, July 02, 2004 11:17 AM
> 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
"Tōkyō" is not an English transliteration of Japanese, as it uses
diacritics not found in English. The correct English transliteration is in
fact "Tokyo", which does not round trip.
> Japanese), or Kahnawake (English/French) for Kahnawà:ke
Errr - didn't the Emglish/French useage predate the Mohawk alphabet?
Pretty perverse case there.
> (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.
In part you are correct, but this really only holds where the place
name gets enough usage to develop its own name in the other language. Most
famous places (Paris, New York, et. al.) have language specific names in
most languages, but lesser knowns such as Hà Tĩnh are unlikely to have
such names.
> On the other hand, maybe "Ha Tinh" is just lazy typography.
From National Geographic? Medoubts. This is a deliberate removal
of the diacritics unfamiliar to English readers, and is a traditional way to
present foreign words. If we're going to categorize trans-thingies, I think
this deserves its own category, but since it's all relative and vague, I'm
not terribly concerned. Mostly I just wondered if it did fit in anywhere.
Seems it doesn't.
/|/|ike
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