Google is your friend – some clues:
http://www.forbes.com/profile/johanna-sigurdardottir/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Althingi Jony From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Stephan Stiller Sent: יום ו 05 יולי 2013 11:25 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: writing in an alphabet with fewer letters: letter replacements 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
