> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On
> Behalf Of Chris Harvey
> Sent: Friday, July 02, 2004 11:17 AM
> 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
"TÅkyÅ" is not an English transliteration of Japanese, as it uses diacritics not found in English. The correct English transliteration is in fact "Tokyo", which does not round trip.
> Japanese), or Kahnawake (English/French) for KahnawÃ:ke
Errr - didn't the Emglish/French useage predate the Mohawk alphabet? Pretty perverse case there.
> (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.
In part you are correct, but this really only holds where the place name gets enough usage to develop its own name in the other language. Most famous places (Paris, New York, et. al.) have language specific names in most languages, but lesser knowns such as HaÌ TiÌnh are unlikely to have such names.
> On the other hand, maybe "Ha Tinh" is just lazy typography.
From National Geographic? Medoubts. This is a deliberate removal of the diacritics unfamiliar to English readers, and is a traditional way to present foreign words. If we're going to categorize trans-thingies, I think this deserves its own category, but since it's all relative and vague, I'm not terribly concerned. Mostly I just wondered if it did fit in anywhere. Seems it doesn't.
/|/|ike
