--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...> wrote:

>
> Transliterating "English" into what?

Transliterating English into a real script with the intention that it
be read by the users of another script. (I don't require that they be
expected to get the pronuciation right without specific study - which
might not avail them much with English!) Perhaps I should replace
'read by...' by 'seen by users of another script as a human language.'
I wanted to say 'speakers of another language', but the
transliteration of Serbo-Croat between the Latin and Cyrillic
alphabets may be a perfectly good example of transliteration.

Back to my Thai 'Klingon' example, what would be *transcribed* in the
Royal Thai General System (RTGS) as 'cha tham arai' (meaning 'What to
do?') would be transliterated as 'j# tM o#qr', which may not be
intelligible to anyone but me. One may therefore argue that this is
not a 'proper' transliteration.

So, suitable examples should be a transliteration into Cyrillic for
Russian, Thai script for Thai, Devanagari for Hindi.

I forgot that I had seen transliterations (pretty much ciphers) of
English into runes - but they are intended for English speakers and
barely count.

> "English" isn't a script.

Aren't transliterations tailored to the source language? I would
expect English 'chat' and French 'chat' to be transliterated to
Cyrillic differently. I would also expect transliterations of Hindi
and Sanskrit from Devanagari to differ - or should one expect to see
silent final 'a' in a transliteration of Hindi?

In support of the latter point, the ISCII character encoding supports
not only the characters of several scripts but has font attributes
such as bold. In this system it has a Romanisation mode in which text
is to be displayed in transliteration rather than the native alphabet.
The ISCII specification-substitute states that the silent final 'a'
is to be dropped in transliteration of Northern scripts, thus 'bandh',
'kamp', not 'bandha' or 'kampa', but the 'a' remains in 'putra'. (I
don't have any evidence that this feature was ever implemented properly.)

Moreover, flicking through the Unicode 5.0 charts, I found at least 64
base letters for the Roman script and there are more to come. (It's a
bit subjective. For example, how does one count letters with
retroflex hooks?) I suspect most transcription schemes do not handle
that many. I'd be surprised if there were a Roman to Cyrillic
transliteration scheme in use that handled all of 'd', 'ð', barred 'd'
(Vietnamese, but also an old contraction for 'der') and insular 'd'.
(The last character isn't in Unicode yet, but it's on its way in.)

Richard.