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 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore
--Douglas Hofstadter
