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

> 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.

In such a situation, I just grit my teeth and insert the
'greater-than' signs manually.

It did raise one interesting question. How are casing scripts
transliterated into non-casing scripts?

>> 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 a real script with the intention that it

> a) what does "real script" mean, and (b) what do you mean by

"transliterate"?

I'm excluding conscripts, and the next clause is an attempt to exclude
ciphers such as writing English in Samaritan letters.

>> be read by the users of another script. (I don't require that they be
>> THE USER OF YET A THIRD SCRIPT?

No. Amend 'another' to 'the second'.

>>...

> 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.

In practice, I want both. I find it extremely frustrating to
encounter a Thai name in transcription and have little idea of how to
pronounce it or write it.

> A transliteration is a 1-to-1 correspondence between the characters

of one script and the characters of another script.

I thought the key feature of a transcription was that it was
reversible, i.e. you could get back to the original. (I would allow
tagging used for 'context-sensitive' information to be lost.) Having
a 1-to-1 correspondence of characters raises the question of what you
do with preposed vowels and multi-part vowels in Indic scripts. There
isn't even agreement over whether some vowels are unitary or multipart
- do Thai sara ii, sara ue and sara uue contain sara i? If you
re-order Devanagari short 'i' to follow the consonants, why not
re-order the Thai vowels?

It seems that the Spaniards and the Welsh, traditionally at least,
view certain digraphs as letters, e.g. 'ch' and 'll'. Would you allow
them to be treated as single letters in transliteration?

> 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.

But there are implicit markers! A preposed vowel only occurs at the
start of a syllable and sara a only at the end. If one moves the
preposed vowel to its phonetic position, one needs a way of recovering
its position. If one does not have one, one has neither a
transliteration nor a faithful transcription.

> 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 ...

I like the historical approach, but I feel uneasy about using <'b> and
<'d> for bo bai mai and do dek. It feels silly to write the
apostrophe when they are the final consonants of native words, even
though they are preglottalised as in much British English. (Not in
Australian English, though.) Also, writing <v> for fo fan is likely
to be misunderstood. I've got Griswold's book on order from the library.

> 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.

As in ISO 11940:1998.

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

These are the trivial transliterations.

>> 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!

I'd want to represent English soft 'ch' as Cyrillic che and French
'ch' as Cyrillic she. Of course, when transliterating English
'chute', it would be reasonable for an exception-handling mechanism to
be called up.

Richard.