Hi Mike,
AM> That's nice, but the academic community is writing about the
AM> language, not in the language, which is not the same thing.
The distinction between object language and metalanguage is something
that probably everyone in the academic community is aware of. However,
since this thread has started to make general statements some time ago
already, i'd like to point out that it makes no difference whatsoever
what a text contains if there is the question of encoding it.
Transliteration isn't obsolete jsut because you can encode the
original on the computer, in spite of the folks mainly employing it
being scientists. When we have scripts encoded which are used almost
only for scientific purposes (such as Ogham or math symbols), we
shouldn't really distinguish between whether a symbol is employed in
an academic or non-academic fashion in a given context.
And just to be nitpicking, I'm not necessarily writing about Arabic
when I use Arabic terms in transliteration. They're just part of my
scientific vocabulary which is necessary to describe a certain
phenomenon; I use a term like "hadith" in transliteration just like a
physicist would use the term "Brewster's angle". The percentage of
linguists in the transliteration-using academic community is
surprisingly small. A cultural scientist actually uses Arabic and does
not talk about it when he uses Arabic terms.
AM> That's all fine and well, but academic writings on a language are
AM> not the same as common writings in a language. I don't think we're setting
AM> up a page for people who want to know what scripts are used to publish
AM> academic papers about a given language.
I think it has become sufficiently clear that scientists as hopefully
intelligent human beings are capable of finding out about the state of
implementation of their scripts, so the purpose of a language/encoding
list has been established well enough. You were, however, making a
statement like "especially given that Unicode removes the need for
most transliteration scripts", of a rather general nature, and that's
where I don't quite agree, since transliteration is still a legitimate
and established way of producing text and the need for transliteration
didn't arise only because ASCII didn't contain enough characters. It's
a bit older than that.
Greetings & sorry for dwelling on the stuff a little bit :-)
Philipp mailto:uzsv2k@uni-bonn.de
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