RE: Looking for transcription or transliteration standards latin->arabicMark Davis wrote:
> In that case, we'd call it a transcription, since it doesn't roundtrip > from source to target back to source. It is actually quite common for > style guides for non-academic publications to have a restricted list > of characters and character + accent combinations, and convert all > others. For example, the Economist style guide, as I recall, > recommends keeping accents in French, German, Italian, and Spanish > names and words, but dropping them otherwise; and converting > characters like à and à to nearest equivalents, "th". > > Note that the latter loses information in two ways; the obvious one is > that the distinction between à and à are lost; the less obvious one is > that the distinction between them and a *real* 't' followed by 'h' in > the source is lost. So that loses the distinction in sounds between > 'th' in 'cathode' and 'cathouse', as well as between 'thy' and > 'thigh'. The latter problem could be solved easily by transcribing à as "dh," but English speakers seem really terrified of the sequence "dh." The former problem is only a problem if "t" + "h" combinations (like "cathouse") are actually used in the language. I don't know if this is true for Icelandic. It is certainly true for Old English, where à and à are also seen. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
