Philippe Verdy wrote on Tuesday, May 18th, 2004 12:24: > Also there are differences in orthographs in the table lists: > the plain text version and Table 2 use consonnants with dot > below for the english name, but Table 1 use basic Latin > consonnants (example for Malalayam).
I believe these are typos that you ought to specify exhaustively to Michael to have then corrected. It looks like to me that all the diacritics would have to be dropped in English, and that a number of them escaped the net... > Dots below are probably appropriate for the French name, > not for the English one. ??? French usage has always been to "morph" the original name to suit French orthographic rules. OTOH, it appears to me (feel free to contradict me, and also to to point me the epoch when these things did change) that English habits now is to follow the native name and the translitteration rules. A good example I found recently is the name of Cervantes' main work, which short name is "Don Quixote" in English, the same as it was in (original) Castilian, while at the same time it was adapted in French as "Don Quichotte" (same prononciation as original), and similarly in today's Castilian "Don Quijote" (with subsequent change in prononciation.) I do not know how English natives will pronounce it, however. Another point is that the reference work about scripts in French are for a good part old-fashioned, while at the same time recent English references seem to abound. I may be biaised here (I surely am, in fact), but it appears to me to represent a certain evolution in the world use of languages in scientific works along the last century... As a result, when we build the tables for 15924, we choose to have the French name to represent the widely used practices, with the obvious conventions (like ^ for the lengthned vowels) and some long-used ones, like ç for s in Indian scripts (but ch for ? since it fits the need well.) But we do avoid all the "strange" characters. The case of ? in Malaya?am (or O?iya) is exemplary : the sound does not exist in French, and about no Frenchies will know how to say it correctly. Furthermore, I highly doubt that the most immediate feeling of a litterate French when he sees subscripted dots would be to imagine the retroflex feature this convention implies... So we followed current practices and droped all the subscripted dots. We do keep a number of strange spellings for the alternate variants (between parenthesis), particularly when usage was not fixed (I particularly record about Cham this about.) Antoine
