Re: Compiling a list of Semitic transliteration characters

From: Richard Wordingham <richard.wordingham_at_ntlworld.com>
Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2012 19:16:23 +0100

On Fri, 7 Sep 2012 11:43:59 -0500
Naena Guru <naenaguru_at_gmail.com> wrote:

> Transliteration or Romanizing
>
> My first advice is not to embark on making solutions for languages
> that you do not know. Unicode ruined Indic and Singhala by making
> 'solutions' for them by not doing any meaningful research and
> ignoring well-known Sanskrit grammar and previous solutions for Indic.

The problems, if any, are due to thinking that the Indians understood
what they were doing when they developed ISCII. Such problems as
there are appear to arise from a belief that all Indic scripts are like
Devanagari.
 
> I romanized Singhala, probably the most complex script among all
> Indic, and made an orthographic font that in turn shows the
> transliterated text in its native script.
> http://www.lovatasinhala.com
>
> Some reasons for romanizing:
<snip>
> 3. Make the language accessible to those who are not familiar with the
> script

The rest of the post is irrelevant. Transliterations from Semitic
languages have been established for this reason, and possibly because
of costs of making and setting type. One issue at hand is that there is
not a *single* transliteration to hand, and certainly not a single
pan-Semitic one. Therefore I strongly doubt that an 8-bit code would
encompass everything that was needed.

Richard.
Received on Fri Sep 07 2012 - 13:18:21 CDT

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