Jony Rosenne <rosennej at qsm dot co dot il> wrote: > And with the availability of Unicode, I think the need for > transliteration is fading. It seems that these schemes can only be > used by people who know the transliterated script.
On the contrary, untransliterated (or untranscribed) text can only be read by people who know the original script. Transliterations and transcriptions at least give the Latin-script-only reader a fighting chance to pronounce the text. (Without them, those of use who can't read Arabic would have a real struggle reading today's news: Saddam Hussein, Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, etc.) The availability of Unicode means that scores of writing systems and orthographies can be represented in computers, all at once, unambiguously It doesn't mean that humans have become capable of reading scripts they previously couldn't read. Sorry if this wasn't what you meant. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
