2012/9/7 Leif Halvard Silli <[email protected]>: > The word "Roman", can also refer to "Greek". So it is best to avoid > that term. ;-)
The Roman empire was speaking a large set of languages (and writing in various scripts) from Europe to Asia and Africa, even if Latin was used in Rome, and written in the Latin script (but not only). But the conventional meaning of "romanisation" is that it is a transcription to the Latin script (independantly of the target language). The concept of transliteration, rather than transcription, is in fact quite new in human history : the initial need was just to write how languages were pronounced, with more or less approximations, to match the way another language is written, read and pronounced (in the target phonology). So a transcription has always been lossy. But the real difference between transcription and transliteration is for another role : a transliteration attempts to preserve the maximum of the source language phonology and meaning, avoiding most ambiguities. So a transliteration occurs within the same language. A translietteration scheme is created when a language starts changing its standard script in some area. But even in that case it is extremely rare that this conversion will be lossless : there are frequent adaptation of the orthography, and some historic orthographies in the original script (such as mute letters or more frequently letters whose current phonology has changed considerably so that the original orthography in the source script is already far away from the actually spoken language, or because some historic distinctions are no longer heard and the transliteration scheme is representing the letters the same way : N-to-1 is then frequent as well). For some pairs or scripts, it is impossible to be 1-to-1, because the scripts work very differently : alphabets are not like abjads or akharas, and not like ideographic scripts. So adaptation is unavoidable. When a language changes its standard script, there is also very frequently an orthographic reform on the new script, so even the rules of transliterations contain a lot of new exceptions, to match the new orthography. When this change of script is just motivated to ease the learning of the language by people that are better aware of another script, the transliteration rules will often be more strict. It will be much stricter if this change of script is motivated by technical reasons (but people are generally not very well trained on how to make this conversion, so they will each one use their own transliteration scheme, to approximate the language. For this reason, the distinction between lossy and lossless is not very relevant to make the distinction between a traditional transcription and a "modern" transliteration. My opinion if that the simplest conversions that try to avoid most ambiguities are just named "transliteration" and they occur within the same language in the same region. Transcriptions are more traditional and instead on focusing on the source language, they try to best approximate the phonology of another language in its current common orthography. Different needs, different rules, but even in both cases the rules are not followed exactly. None of them are lossless. But the distinction is there. There's no clearly defined separation line between transliteration schemes and transcription schemes. except by their intent to preserve a source language or best approximate another one. So the stadnard conversion of Chinese from Han ideographs to Bopomofo or Latin (with the Piyin standard) could be called "translierations" even if there's by evidence a lot of losses. Same thing about Romaji in Japanese. And even for Korean the standard conversion from the Hangul alphabet to Latin creates some ambiguities and is a bit lossy. Note also that a transcription also occurs within the same script : when you adapt an orthography to use other letters than in the original orthography, this is not a transliteration. For example when you transcript French to an English context, you'll commonly convert "ou" into "oo", or will disambiguate some "s" into "z", or some "c" into "k" or "s". The intent is to tell English native speakers how to read a word written in another language (e.g. you say that the French word "paille" should be read like the English "pie". This is not a transliteration but a transcription). As well, when you convert the language into a phonetic alphabet like IPA, the process is definitely not a transliteration but a transcription, even if this occurs within the same Latin script (many people are arguing that IPA is not part of the Latin script as it does not contain "letters", but "symbols", and it is monocameral and it cannot follow the common typographic rules, in addition to the fact that it borrows symbols from Greek letters and adds new specific symbols plus many new diacritics) !
