Hi Richard,
I know of standards for transcribing foreign alphabets (by /target/
locale – Are they relevant here? If so, which?) [...]
This may well depend on both source and target locale! How often
will locale have to be broken down on a non-local basis? Different
newspapers in the same city may have different conventions!
It also depends on the time/era, and sometimes there's just a mess. I
recall the chaotic variation in the rendering of names of Eastern
European composers in German (and that of foreign names in general). And
I think it's futile to try to precisely describe journalistic practice
in this domain.
What I had in mind was more specific: Germans are supposed to convert
[ä,ö,ü,ß] to [ae,oe,ue,ss], though I don't know what's considered
best/legal wrt documents required for entering the US, for example.
I was thinking that there might be a similar Icelandic tradition of
mapping non-{A, ..., Z}-letters into the {A, ..., Z}∪punctuation space,
for the purpose of filling out forms in another country and such. In
that regard, I was wondering whether any of the numerous transcription
schemes that are floating around (and are sometimes backed by
standardization bodies) play a role here and are prescriptive or (if
they are not prescriptive) followed to some extent.
For example, there is a Romanian tradition of converting
combining squiggle below to a following 'z'.
"squiggle" – you're reminding me of /that other thread/ going on right
now ;-)
drop all the accents
That (more generally: finding a root / approximation / approximating
digraph) might be the most common method (my wild guess based on casual
observation, and it's not exactly a particularly difficult guess to
make), but for ð/þ it's not clear what people will do. I'll save the
list the obvious speculation and let someone who knows answer directly.
Stephan
