--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, Michael Everson <everson@...> wrote:

>
> At 10:56 +0000 2006-11-25, Richard Wordingham wrote:
>
> >Transliterating English into a real script with the intention that it
> >be read by the users of another script.
>
> Daniels is right, Richard. This is nonsense. English is not a
> "script". Please be precise with your terminology. "Orthography",
> "alphabet", and "script" are very different things.

The only vagueness I see is in what is meant by 'English'. Do
'façade', 'café', 'thru', 'Western Cwm', 'Lhasa' and 'schadenfreude'
count as English? A narrow definition would be reversibly
transforming written English word forms identified by reference to a
standard grammar and a standard dictionary, encyclopaedia or gazetteer
and composed only of the 26 letters without accents or other
diacritics into sequences of a script. One would expect a
transliteration to cope with a wider range of inputs, but in general I
can see immediate difficulties with punctuation. I am not sure that
this precision actually helps, and I'm sure my wording could be improved.

The primary point about identification is to allow implicit
information to be represented in the transliteration, e.g. vowels when
transliterating unpointed Arabic or syllabification and phonetic vowel
positioning for Thai (e.g. homographs such as _peelaa_ 'appointed
time' and _plao_ 'axle'). For English a transliteration might choose
to differentiate homgraphs such as 'sow', 'lead' and 'read'. A
secondary point is that it does allow one to reject sequences of
characters that do not appear in any way to be English. Practical
examples from Thai include unrecognised combinations of vowel symbols
and misplaced tonemarks. This, of course, brings us back to the
question of 'completeness'.

Richard.