This is a lot of fun to talk about, especially when considering how hard it is to transcribe material for singing. I have some choral scores that used some bizarre vocalization scheme in parallel with the actual English words ... I forget what it was called, but I believe it has mercifully died out... Anybody remember it?
At 01:21 PM 3/13/03 -0800, Mark D. Lew wrote: >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? Transcribed stops of one kind or another are not unknown. Aside from Arabic, the earlier transliteration system for Chinese included them, and we used them in English for a while to separate pronounced doubled vowels (as in coöperate, though the glottal stop was softened in such words to 'w' and 'y'). The romanized version of Navajo has glottal stops (as in shizhé'é and yá'át'ééh), which I only know from a failed attempt to learn it about 10 years ago. There are probably others. I'd think that sometimes it's helpful to show the stops in less familiar words that have no tradition in the language. >Same story for "Sa'udi" which is a three syllable word in >Arabic but in English generally rhymes with either "rowdy" or "gaudy". But Saudi was already in use in a linguistically more innocent era (I grew up when Bogota was pronounced like the town in New Jersey). Much time was spent a few years ago on the best way to transliterate Khadafi (the Times goes with Qaddafi or some Q variant). And you might recall the CNN tussle over how to pronounce Qatar. In one of the more amusing results of this, a native reporter told Wolf Blitzer that it was hard to pronounce, but most closely resembled the English word "cutter". With her accent, she said "cutter" with very clear t's, not the softened d sound of spoken English. But the reporters started saying "In reports from Cudder today..." Not to mention Xosha... :) >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. It can be useful if you actually want to make sense of the language from its transliteration. (Do you think a lot of folks really do that?) But as in the Cudder/Qatar example, it's only an occasional name or a word most folks will care about. With respect to Shi'ite, then, the mark is useful (whatever the objections to the etymology of the anglicized word) because it distinguishes it in a way that was lost in, say, the common pronunciation of "shiitake" (shih-tah-kee). A divided ii survivor is "skiing". (There are a handful of separated technical words.) So likely an unseparated "shiite" in the public press (not a journal, but a publication like Time, which was my first example) will end up being pronounced "sheet". The use of the turned comma (vs. an ordinary apostrophe) is a tip-of-the-type to the character's academic representation, I suppose. >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. That's for sure. As a connoisseur of the Dutch "ei" and "ij" sounds (not to mention the guttural variants, which was the cause for some embarrassment when I moved there for a while in the early 1990s, and ordered what I called a "groalsh" ... "Ah, 'n xrrolss!" was the smiling resply), I can appreciate how IPA is only a very general tool. I think, though, when there is basically no information or tradition, some can be very useful. Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
