Lukas Pietsch wrote:
>
> well, the English dictionaries give usages of words in everyday
> language, and that's fine. But in their usage as technical terms,
> the distinction between "transcription" and "transliteration"
> (roughly along the lines of the
> http://www.elot.gr/tc46sc2/purpose.html page) seems to me
> to be a fairly well-established one, in the field of linguistics at least.
>
Yes, this would seem to be fairly widespread in the field.
>
> Sure, but we're dealing with a scholarly discipline's technical
> vocabulary here, and it's not such a bad idea in this case if
> computer people dealing with language adopt the usage of
> linguists, is it?
>
Does the vocabulary make things clearer or cause confusion?
If we need to distinguish between reversible script conversion
and irreversible script conversion, could we not simply say
"reversible script conversion" and so forth?
We speak of code page conversions, but we haven't re-defined
existing words to differentiate between the kind that's reversible
and the kind that isn't (as far as I know).
> > what they call "transliteration" could easily be
> > referred to as "reversible transliteration" in plain English,
> > without 'breaking existing applications' like my dictionary.
>
> You must understand: this isn't about "breaking existing
> applications", it's about a "higher-level protocol"! ;-)
It's about clarity and precision, too. When someone obviously
intelligent like Doug Ewell admits to still being unclear weeks
after being educated by hair-splitting techies, isn't there
a problem?
With regards to the 'purpose.html' page linked above, how
seriously should we take a page which includes phraseology
like:
"It is indispensable in that it permits the univocal
transmission of a written message between two
countries using different writing systems or
exchanging a message the writing of which is
different from their own."
...? The page was last updated in 1996, yet the first line
of the page has the typo "were" for "where". The sentence
quoted above is needlessly redundant and there is no such
word as "univocal" (as far as I know).
My apologies to the authors of that page for mentioning
this in a public forum. I make typos, too.
J. M. Sykes wrote:
> I'm relieved to find that OED and Webster agree, though
> note that the OED recognises that transcribe is sometimes
> used as a synonym of transliterate.
Perhaps it is sometimes mis-used as a synonym, I'm tempted
to say, but must bow to the higher authority of the Oxford
English Dictionary.
> Experts redefine words at the risk of confusing non-experts;
> when they do, they should not be surprised at the ensuing
> confusion -- they brought it on themselves.
This is an excellent point, thank you for making it.
Best regards,
James Kass.
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