(preposing chevrons requires inserting hard line breaks as well)

--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...



----- Original Message ----
From: Richard Wordingham <richard@...>
To: qalam@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Saturday, November 25, 2006 11:04:28 AM
Subject: Re: Theory of transliteration?

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

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

MAYBE WITH A NOTE THAT SENTENCES AND PROPER NAMES BEGIN WITH A CAPITAL? FOR ENGLISH, PROPER ADJECTIVES ALSO, FOR GERMAN COMMON NOUNS ALSO

>> 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.

WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO EXCLUDE THE WORLD'S HANDFUL OF SAMARITANS FROM READING SOMETHING IN ENGLISH? SAMARITAN IS MERELY A GRAPHIC VARIANT OF HEBREW, SO THE CONVENTIONS ALREADY EXIST.

>> 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 _TRANSCRIPTION_ TELLS YOU EXACTLY HOW TO PRONOUNCE IT.

A _TRANSLITERATION_ TELLS YOU EXACTLY HOW TO SPELL 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

ABSOLUTELY NOT. THE PROPONENTS OF "BIUNIQUENESS" IN PHONOLOGICAL THEORY ULTIMATELY LOST THAT BATTLE IN THE POST-BLOOMFIELDIAN WORLD.

A TRANSLITERATION, HOWEVER, IS PERFECTLY REVERSIBLE.

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

IN INDIC, THERE IS ONLY ONE POSSIBLE PLACEMENT OF EACH VOWEL MARK, EVEN THOUGH THE VOWEL DESIGNATED BY SUCH A VOWEL MARK ALWAYS GOES AFTER THE LAST CONSONANT IN ITS GROUP. HENCE NO AMBIGUIITY IN EITHER DIRECTION.

IF IN THAI THE SAME SYMBOL MEANS DIFFERENT THINGS WHEN (SAY) BEFORE OR AFTER AN AKSHARA, THEN IT WILL COUNT AS DIFFERENT SYMBOLS AND HAVE DIFFERENT TRANSLITERATIONS.

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?

ALL I KNOW ABOUT THAI IS WHAT'S IN WWS. HAAS'S BOOKLET IS INCOMPREHENSIBLE TO SOMEONE WHO DOES NOT KNOW THE LANGUAGE.

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?

WHY NOT?

> 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.

IF THAT PREPOSED VOWEL CAN ONLY OCCUR AT THE START OF A SYLLABLE, THEN THERE IS NO AMBIGUITY. IF THE SAME MARK HAS A DIFFERENT FUNCTION IF IT DOESN'T APPEAR IN SYLLABLE-INITIAL POSITION, THEN IT WILL HAVE A DISTINCTIVE TRANSLITERATION (SEE ABOVE).

> 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

HEY, I DIDN'T SAY ANYTHING ABOUT APOSTROPHES, THAT'S YOUR CONTRIBUTION!

UNLESS, OF COURSE, YOU'RE REFERRING TO A STANDARD TRANSLITERATION THAT'S BEEN IN USE FOR A CENTURY, IN WHICH CASE, WHY IS THERE A QUESTION?

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.

IT COULD ONLY BE MISUNDERSTOOD IF MORE THAN ONE THAI SYMBOL IS TRANSLITERATED WITH <v>,

> 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.

YOU'RE COMMENTING ON YOUR OWN REMARK ...

>> 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.

THAT WOULD NOT BE A TRANSLITERATION.

MAYBE THE ONLY WORK ON THIS TOPIC IS HANS WELLISCH, THE CONVERSION OF SCRIPTS. I HAVE THE DISSERTATION VERSION FROM UMI, BUT IT WAS PUBLISHED (ACADEMIC? ERLBAUM? GREENWOOD?), I THINK WITHOUT REVISION. IT'S A WORK IN LIBRARY SCIENCE SO IT'S PRACTICALLY ORIENTED BUT VERY THOROUGH AND LINGUISTICALLY INFORMED.