RE: writing in an alphabet with fewer letters: letter replacements

From: Jonathan Rosenne <jonathan.rosenne_at_gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 2013 12:47:34 +0300

Hi Stephan,

 

Tell me about it. The official transliteration for Hebrew to the Latin script is obsolete, and the situation in this country is a mess.

 

Best regards,

 

Jonathan (Jony) Rosenne

 

From: unicode-bounce_at_unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce_at_unicode.org] On Behalf Of Stephan Stiller
Sent: יום ו 05 יולי 2013 12:21
To: unicode_at_unicode.org
Subject: Re: writing in an alphabet with fewer letters: letter replacements

 

Hi Jonathan,

I definitely appreciate the partial datapoints from your links, but

Google is your friend

by itself doesn't lead us closer to a real answer, and in this case I think that there are at least some good answers, and in any case some answers will be better than others.

This reminds me of former South Korean president 이승만 (not exactly a sympathetic figure), whose most common English rendering ("Syngman Rhee") doesn't follow any system of transcription I'm aware of. (For Chinese, historical figures seem to be predominantly rendered in pinyin now, though I haven't tried to do a thorough check including TW etc, and Sun Yat-sen is a famous exception. I think Korean figures mostly follow the Revised Romanization now, but "Rhee" persists and stands out.)

Another interesting case I know is that of a Bhutanese gentleman I met in an airport: the name in his passport wasn't listed in the original Dzongkha (with Bhutanese Tibetan writing) at all (and nowhere in the passport, according to him) but only with Latin letters.

Stephan
Received on Fri Jul 05 2013 - 04:49:46 CDT

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