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

From: John Cowan (cowan@ccil.org)
Date: Sun Jul 04 2004 - 03:31:17 CDT

  • Next message: Philipp Reichmuth: "Re: Looking for transcription or transliteration standards latin- >arabic"

    Doug Ewell scripsit:

    > On the contrary, untransliterated (or untranscribed) text can only be
    > read by people who know the original script. Transliterations and
    > transcriptions at least give the Latin-script-only reader a fighting
    > chance to pronounce the text.

    Transliterations don't work so well for that, but transliterating some
    scripts to Latin is a necessity (for me, at least) to even recognize them.
    I can cope with Greek, Hebrew, and Cyrillic, but an English text full
    of Arabic or Chinese names presented in the usual scripts for those
    languages would be hopeless -- I wouldn't be able to reliably tell one
    name from another.

    This is true even though I have no more Greek, Hebrew, or Russian than
    I have Arabic or Chinese. 

    -- 
John Cowan  cowan@ccil.org  www.ccil.org/~cowan  www.reutershealth.com
"If he has seen farther than others,
        it is because he is standing on a stack of dwarves."
                --Mike Champion, describing Tim Berners-Lee (adapted)

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