I don't know what's up with this particular yahoo group, but Verizon Yahoo refuses to Quote a previous message as anything but a graphic, and the only way I can interpolate comments is by changing to "Plain Text," with no possibiliy of font-formatting, so I'm going to type in all-caps, whether some persons find it impossible to decouple that phenomenon from hostility or not.

--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...



----- Original Message ----
From: Richard Wordingham <richard@...>
To: qalam@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Saturday, November 25, 2006 5:56:31 AM
Subject: Re: Theory of transliteration?

--- In qalam@... com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@. ..> wrote:
>
> Transliterating "English" into what?

Transliterating English into a real script with the intention that it

A) WHAT DOES "REAL SCRIPT" MEAN, AND (B) WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY "TRANSLITERATE"?

be read by the users of another script. (I don't require that they be

THE USER OF YET A THIRD SCRIPT?

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.

INDEED IT IS, BUT ABOVE YOU APPEAR TO BE ASKING FOR A TRANSCRIPTION, NOT A TRANSLITERATION. THE DISTINCTION HAS BEEN IN USE FOR WELL OVER HALF A CENTURY; SEE GELB'S GLOSSARY.

A TRANSLITERATION IS A 1-TO-1 CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN THE CHARACTERS OF ONE SCRIPT AND THE CHARACTERS OF ANOTHER SCRIPT. E.G., IN YOUR PREVIOUS EXAMPLE YOU WERE CONCERNED ABOUT SYLLABLE DIVISION IN THAI, BUT SINCE THERE'S NO SYLLABLE-BOUNDARY-MARKER IN THAI SCRIPT, THERE CANNOT BE ONE IN A ROMAN-LETTER (OR ANY-OTHER-LETTER) TRANSLITERATION OF THAI.

YOU SEEM TO HAVE BEEN ASKING ABOUT A TRANSCRIPTION OF THAI (AND ABOVE OF ENGLISH), WHICH YIELDS THE PRONUNCIATION OF THE LANGUAGE -- TYPICALLY, IN PHONEMIC TERMS.

FOR TRANSLITERATING THAI INTO ROMAN (SAY), YOU COULD USE A VARIETY OF DIACRITICS TO DISTINGUISH THE KHs, OR YOU COULD GO HISTORICAL AND USE BOTH GH AND KH, OR YOU COULD USE NUMERIC INDICES ...

IF YOU NEED TO PRESERVE BOTH (E.G.) THE VARIETY OF KH-LETTERS _AND_ THE PRONUNCIATION OF THE LANGUAGE, YOU WOULD USE SOME SORT OF HYBRID SCHEME.

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.

WHY? THEY'RE SPELLED EXACTLY THE SAME!

THEY WOULD OF COURSE BE TRANSCRIBED 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?

DEPENDS ON THE PURPOSE OF THE TRANSLITERATION, NO? IF HINDI DOESN'T WRITE VISARGA AT THE END OF A CONSONANT-FINAL WORD, THEN A TRANSLITERATION CAN'T DO SO EITHER. I SUPPOSE YOU COULD BE SUPER-FUSSY AND DO IT THE WAY THE MAYANISTS DO IT, BY PUTTING AN UNNEEDED FINAL VOWEL IN PARENTHESES, BUT THEN YOU'RE SLIPPING INTO TRANSCRIPTION.

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.)

THE DOZENS OF CYRILLIC ALPABETS CREATED FOR NON-SLAVIC LANGUAGES OF THE SOVIET UNION FROM THE 1930s ON DON'T NECESSARILY USE THE SAME CYRILLIC LETTERS FOR THE SAME SOUNDS IN DIFFERENT LANGUAGES.

EACH SOVIET ALPHABET WAS THUS A DIFFERENT SYSTEM, SO COMPLETE UNIFORMITY IS NOT POSSIBLE.

SIMILARLY, WHEN LLOYD ANDERSON AND I WERE CREATING FONTS FOR SOME INDIC SCRIPTS, IT BECAME CLEAR THAT IT WASN'T POSSIBLE TO MAKE THEM ALL BOTH INTERTRANSLITERATABLE AND TYPEABLE MNEMONICALLY ON A STANDARD KEYBOARD. (i DID THE ORIYA ONE ALL BY MYSELF -- HIS KNACK WAS FOR COMING UP WITH MAC KEYBOARDS THAT WERE NEARLY INTUITIVE THROUGHOUT.) INDIC INTERTRANSLITERATABILITY IS IN FACT A DESIDERATUM, BECAUSE SANSKRIT CAN BE WRITTEN IN ANY LOCAL SCRIPT AT ALL (EVEN THOUGH THESE DAYS, THANKS TO THE BRITS, YOU USUALLY ONLY SEE IT IN DEVANAGARI.