Thank you Phillip, so, what did you say? On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 8:58 AM, Philippe Verdy <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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) ! > >
