Subject: Re: (i18n.413) Transliteration [and transcription]

From: Otto Stolz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Nov 1997 10:05:23 +0100

Jonathan Rosenne writes:
> I don't think that this day and age there is much need for "representing
> characters from one script by the characters of another script", not after
> we have ISO 10646. Even if there are such local needs, I cannot see why
> they should be standardized.

Some languages, such as Serbo-Cratian, are written in two different scripts.
In such cases, a standardized transliteration, or transscription, is
helpful, if not inevitable. In the case of Serbo-Croatatian, there exists
a standard mapping between Cyrillic, and Latin, characters, i. e. a trans-
literation.

At 15:05 24/11/97 +0100, Keld Jørn 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
                        "Jelzin"
> "Yeltsin"

I deem "transscription" the proper term for this sort of conversion,
as it aims to represent the sound (phonetic values) of the source
language in the writing system of the target language.

And on Nov 24, 22:43, Keld Jørn Simonsen added:
> The rules I am talking about are based strictly on converting on
> a character-by-character base, and thus this is transliteration.

Apparently not so.

In "Jelzin" (the German transscription), the digraph "Je" represents the
Cyrillic Capital Letter Ie; this same Cyrillic letter is represented as
"E" in other contexts (e. g. after an "L"); this distinction is clearly
based on the Russian pronounciation, rather than on the Russion ortho-
graphy. Other examples ar the suffixes "-off", where the F-sound is
written with the Cyrillic Small Letter Ve (which is otherwise transscribed
as  "v"), and the suffix "-owo", where the V-sound is written with the
Cyrillic Small Letter Ghe (which is otherwise transscribed as  "g").

I guess that the Danish transscription works in a quite similar way.

Note that a mere digraph, such as "ts" in the Danish "Jeltsin", is not
sufficient evidence for a transscription, as it could represent the
Cyrillic Small Letter Tse, in a transliteration, or the Ts-sound, in
a transscription.

In Germany, there have been used several transscriptions for the Russian
language, and one transliteration, for the Cyrillic script. Example:
Transliteration                    Transscriptions
Chru<s-Hatchek><c-Hatchek>ew       Chruschtschew, Chruschtschoff

Best wishes,
   Otto Stolz