> OK, just because I do so love monkey wrenches, please explain what I found > in > my atlas: > Vietnamese English > ------> > HaÌ TiÌnh Ha Tinh
> In which we have a trancription/transliteration/taxonomy problem between > Latin > and Latin. Since this does not remotely roundtrip (Ha, for instance, has 18 > Vietnamese > equivalents), and no attempt is made to match pronunciation, how do we refer to it? Perhaps one could think of "Ha Tinh" as the English word for the city, like "Rome" (English) for "Roma" (Italian), or Tokyo (English) for "TÅkyÅ" (English transliteration of Japanese), or Kahnawake (English/French) for KahnawÃ:ke (Mohawk). In these and many other cases, place-names as used in foreign languages sould not be considered tranliterations, but linguistic borrowings, where pronunciation and spelling are often changed in the new language. On the other hand, maybe "Ha Tinh" is just lazy typography. Chris Harvey languagegeek.com
