On Sat, Jun 18, 2011 at 14:09, Gerrit <[email protected]> wrote: > I thought of romanization which is specific to the language the surrounding > text is written in - e.g. French or German. And this is not so much the case > for Chinese or Japanese (except for some words: Beijing in English but > Peking in German). In contrast, Горбачёв is written Gorbatschow in German, > Gorbachev in English and Gorbatchev in French. If you have stuff like this, > you cannot really create hyphenation rules for only the language you want to > transcribe (e.g. Russian), but you have to create a transcription system for > every target language (German, English, French etc). But actually, I guess > that would also be possible: Create specific hyphenation patters for these > surrounding languages and then let Polyglossia automatically select the > hyphenation patter according to the environment, where the e.g. Russian text > is appearing in.
Do you have examples of this outside of proper names? I haven't come across such a case and it'd be interesting to see. But wouldn't such variation defeat the purpose of romanization? I mean, consider the confusion that the Taiwanese government has caused by variously supporting Hanyu pinyin, Tongyong pinyin, and Wade-Giles (you can see all three in use on the Taipei metro system). > > But I am not sure if in literature about these countries, there is not used > a more scientific transcription, which is universal for all surrounding > languages. There's IPA, but that's only for phonetic/phonemic transcription in linguistics papers, and you wouldn't want to hyphenate it anyway. I am curious about the necessity of hyphenating romanization. Is it desirable? I would have thought that foreign words should be treated like proper nouns in running text. -Andy -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
