Re: Unicode transliterations (and other operations)

From: John Cowan (cowan@mercury.ccil.org)
Date: Thu Jul 05 2001 - 12:11:23 EDT


James Kass scripsit:

> An interesting site with writings from various people
> favoring either "Burma" or "Myanmar" suggests that
> Burma and Myanmar are separate words with different
> etymologies.

I don't think so. But the question has become politicized, because
the change (in Latin transliteration only, note) was made by
a government which many believe to be illegitimate.

I agree that the example was a bad one for that reason.

> Does trade jargon (the technical language in a particular field) exist
> to clarify a trade, or is its purpose more to exclude anyone not
> part of the "inner circle"?

Some of each, to be sure.

> I've often wondered about this with regards to subjects like
> programming languages. Is this practice (trade jargon) unique
> to English? In other words, does a Hindi speaker wishing to
> learn, for example, the "C" programming language have any
> advantage over the English speaker because the "C" programming
> instructions in Hindi are in 'plain-Hindi' rather than 'tech-speak'?

On the contrary, it is often worse in other languages, because most of the
technical jargon is typically adopted straight from English.

> > ... In transliteration, we
> > are mapping one script to another in a language-independent way.
> > In transcription, we are mapping the writing conventions of one
> > language to those of another.
>
> This is clear enough and precise. It's also concise in that it condenses
> much of the verbose page "purpose.html" down to two sentences.

Thank you.

Note that I used the jargon verb "map", which is old enough in this
sense that it does appear in dictionaries, but is still probably
unfamiliar to many.

> The reason it makes me uncomfortable is that these definitions
> don't match the standard meanings of the words as contained in
> dictionaries.

So much the worse for dictionaries, then. :-)

> I'm afraid to suggest alternatives like "machine
> transliteration" and "phonetic transcription", though, because
> they are a bit cumbersome and would possibly only add to the
> confusion.

Right. And note that until a decade or two ago, all transliteration
*and* transcription was very much by hand: no machines involved.

> Meanwhile, when someone uses the terms in the
> 'broader sense' (id est: dictionary definition), please let's not
> chide them for it.

Well, fine. But when someone is talking about physics, and
uses "energy", "power", and "force" interchangeably, do we
accept this as a "broader sense" of the terms, or do we
explain to them that in this field, the terms are definitely
*not* interchangeable?

-- 
John Cowan                                   cowan@ccil.org
One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore
	--Douglas Hofstadter



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 13:48:07 EDT