From rosenne@NetVision.net.il Tue Nov 25 05:50:02 1997 Received: from alpha.netvision.net.il (root@alpha.NetVision.net.il [194.90.1.13]) by dkuug.dk (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id FAA18341; Tue, 25 Nov 1997 05:49:59 +0100 Received: from rosenne (ts018p4.pop9a.netvision.net.il [194.90.5.78]) by alpha.netvision.net.il (8.8.6/8.8.6) with SMTP id GAA08147; Tue, 25 Nov 1997 06:57:10 +0200 (IST) Message-Id: <3.0.1.32.19971125065019.006abf3c@mail.netvision.net.il> X-Sender: rosenne@mail.netvision.net.il X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Light Version 3.0.1 (32) Date: Tue, 25 Nov 1997 06:50:19 +0200 To: keld@dkuug.dk (Keld J|rn Simonsen) From: Jonathan Rosenne Subject: Re: Transliteration [and transcription] Cc: i18n@dkuug.dk In-Reply-To: <199711242143.WAA11466@dkuug.dk> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 22:43 24/11/97 +0100, Keld J|rn Simonsen wrote: >Jonathan Rosenne writes: > >> At 15:05 24/11/97 +0100, Keld J|rn Simonsen wrote: >> >Well, these are cultural conventions, as far as I can see. >> >For example, there are a specific way of transliterating russian >> >cyrillic into danish, and also on how to transliterate serbian into >> >danish, and those rules should be clearly recorded, so that >> >for example searches on the net, for "Jeltsin" could be matched >> >for Danish users. >> > >> >Note that there may be other rules for other languages to >> >transliterate for example russian, the germans transliterate >> >the mentioned name as "Jeltzin" and the english transliteration is >> >"Yeltsin" ... >The rules I am talking about are based strictly on converting on >a character-by-character base, and thus this is transliteration. >It is of cause meant to be pronouncable in the target language >environment, but it is fully mechanical. > >I understand that you think there is a need for standards for >this, despite our disagreement on terminology. The rules can be mechanical for Russian, which is fairly phonetic, but are they really? To you spell the suffix as "ovo" or "ogo"? But for Arabic or Hebrew you would most likely add vowels and represent pronounciation, e.g. Tel Aviv rather than Tl Abib. Or not? Jonathan