These are transcriptions. I was talking about transliterations, which use various uncommon letter and diacritics combinations to achieve roundtrip accuracy. Only specialists can make sense of them, and they can just as easily read the original.
Jony > -----Original Message----- > From: Doug Ewell [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Saturday, July 03, 2004 7:50 PM > To: Unicode Mailing List > Cc: Jony Rosenne > Subject: Re: Looking for transcription or transliteration > standards latin- >arabic > > > 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/ > > > >
