Re: Transliterating ancient scripts [was: ASCII and Unicode lifespan]

From: Dean Snyder (dean.snyder@jhu.edu)
Date: Mon May 23 2005 - 18:29:16 CDT

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    Tom Emerson wrote at 6:05 PM on Monday, May 23, 2005:

    >Dean Snyder writes:
    >> You can when they're rendered; and I have been talking all along about
    >> loss of GLYPHIC correspondences in transliterations.
    >
    >Who says that glyphic correspondence is a requirement for
    >transliteration?

    Nobody I know, certainly not I.

    In fact, that's why I said that transliteration is almost tautologically
    a loss of glyphic information.

    Both you and Gregg are completely missing my point. The whole purpose of
    transliteration is to render characters of one script in another, which
    almost by definition, or tautologically, means that there is a loss of
    glyphic information when one transliterates. In fact, that is arguably
    the main reason one transliterates - to substitute the glyphic
    information in the source script with different glyphic information in
    the destination script. I gave several examples where glyphic
    information, in ancient texts, for example, is important information
    that is not conveyed when those texts are transliterated. Hence the
    utility of encoding those scripts.

    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/



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