At 8:43 AM 03/13/03, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:
>Even today, it doesn't seem terribly irrational, since transliteration is a
>process of rendering into the native characters of another system. The
>'half ring' might be Unicode, but that's not native to the system. I can't,
>in fact, think of an example where a non-native character has been used, at
>least until very recent years.
Sure, I understand that. If you haven't got a half-ring available, then
the turned comma makes sense as a substitute. To me, the larger question
is whether you ought to be putting the ayn in at all. After all, you're
not putting the macrons over the long vowels and dots under the emphatic
consonants, so why would you include another symbol which is equally
specialized?
Look at it this way: does the symbol mean anything to the reader? For
readers familiar with Arabic names it does, and if that's your audience,
you ought to put in as much as you can. But when including a few
Arab-derived names in an English text for an anglophone audience, it adds
nothing. How is "shiite" pronounced in America? No one I know even gives
it a glottal stop, much less the pharyngeal consonant that the ayn
represents. Same story for "Sa'udi" which is a three syllable word in
Arabic but in English generally rhymes with either "rowdy" or "gaudy".
>So I like the move toward accurate symbols, though I still wonder how a
>language that is transliterated is visually meaningful when transliterated
>into symbols that aren't among the native characters into which it's being
>transliterated.
As a practical matter, I like a tight transliteration -- that is, one which
has a strongly logical correspondence to the LETTERS of the original
language, as opposed to the sounds -- and then from that the reader can be
taught the sounds.
Singing in Russian offers a good example of that. The most effective is to
learn Cyrillic, but short of that I've found that the best learning tool
for a chorus is a close transliteration with diacritics for details like
palatalized consonants. Which system you use makes little difference, so
long as it's consistent. Then you can take whatever the letters are and
teach the sounds accordingly. ("The 'i' with a line over it sounds like
this....")
What I *don't* like is a transliteration that tells the phonetics alone,
because it inevitably loses information -- whether it's a loose
transliteration (turning pre-stress o's into a's, etc.) or something more
detailed. Even pure IPA falls short. Imagine reading German (or French,
or English) in IPA: Sure, you get the sounds spelled out for you, but you
don't get to know the language as well. There's a lot of subtle information
carried in spelling. It is useful to see that "democrat" and "democracy"
are related, even though they'd look completely different in IPA.
mdl
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