From: Dean Snyder (dean.snyder@jhu.edu)
Date: Mon May 23 2005 - 12:48:03 CDT
Tom Emerson wrote at 10:07 AM on Monday, May 23, 2005:
>Dean Snyder writes:
>> Transliteration is lossy.
>
>Not necessarily.
I do not confine lossiness only to the correspondence between the
abstract characters of one script and those of another - obviously that
can be done losslessly. What I also include is GLYPHIC correspondence,
which almost tautologically, transliteration loses. And, since glyphic
correspondence is important for some activities (see below), we encode
scripts.
>Transcription is by definitionlossy. However, it is
>possible to develop a transliteration scheme that is not lossy: the
>Buckwalter transliteration for Arabic is not lossy for contemporary
>Arabic orthography (though it is not suitable for Qur'anic.)
Buckwalter's transliteration of Arabic <http://www.qamus.org/
transliteration.htm> is, as are all transliterations, lossy. You cannot
tell, for example, from this transliteration that Arabic r & z are
differentiated only by a tiny dot. THAT is pertinent information in many
contexts.
Respectfully,
Dean A. Snyder
Assistant Research Scholar
Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project
Computer Science Department
Whiting School of Engineering
218C New Engineering Building
3400 North Charles Street
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218
office: 410 516-6850
cell: 717 817-4897
www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi/
http://users.adelphia.net/~deansnyder/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon May 23 2005 - 12:51:41 CDT