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

From: John Cowan (jcowan@reutershealth.com)
Date: Tue Jul 06 2004 - 11:20:19 CDT

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    Peter Kirk scripsit:

    > Well, did Gdansk/Danzig change its name backwards and forwards several
    > times over history (thank you, Qrczak, for the interesting information
    > about that), or was it simply that it had different names in different
    > languages?

    Yes to both. Its name in Polish is Gdan'sk, in German Danzig. Which one is
    the dominant name is determined by which power is dominant at a given time.
    What foreigners call the city is influenced, though not determined, by
    when the city first became important to them.

    There is hardly a city in Europe that isn't like this. What makes this
    one special, though hardly unique, is the repeated changes of sovereignty.
    Consider Strassburg/Strasbourg.

    > This makes it not a transliteration problem but a translation
    > problem, one which is common to many geographical names - sometimes the
    > names in different languages are related, and sometimes they are not
    > e.g. Turku/Åbo in Finland, or Yerushalayim/al-Quds, or Dublin/(I'll let
    > Michael tell us the correct Irish form).

    Baile Atha Cliath. Dublin is also an Irish name, though used mostly by
    Norse and English (and now by anglophone Irish, of course). 

    -- 
My confusion is rapidly waxing          John Cowan
For XML Schema's too taxing:            jcowan@reutershealth.com
    I'd use DTDs                        http://www.reutershealth.com
    If they had local trees --          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
I think I best switch to RELAX NG.

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