Peter Kirk schrieb:
(There are also languages written in Arabic and Indic scripts, but I
don't know enough about these to be helpful.)
In principle, the situation with Arabic loanwords and the need to retain
the original Arabic spelling is the same there.
Most of these conversions can be programmed easily, although there is
a small problem with the new Uzbek Latin alphabet, deliberately
based on ASCII only plus apostrophe serving as a diacritic, for sh,
ch and gh are usually digraphs [...]
This is indeed a problem, even though only with "sh" and possibly "iy",
even though the latter appears only in word-final position. As far as I
know, "c" is not used in Uzbek except in the "ch" digraph, and the
apostrophed digraphs "o'" and "g'" are not really problematic in this
respect.
Nevertheless, it is an extremely awkward alphabet from a typographic
point of view, and also it's not exceedingly systematic to write "sh",
"ch" but "g'"). The new official Qaraqalpaq Latin alphabet proposed by
the Uzbek government is even weirder, it uses "a'", "i'", "u'" and "n'"
in addition to the Uzbek "g'" and "o'".
Changing in and out of Arabic script is much more complicated. The
main issue is that Arabic loan words (which are common in most of
these languages) usually have to be spelled exactly as in Arabic
(oddly, except for TEH MARBUTA which becomes either TEH or HEH) even
though many of the distinctions are lost in pronunciation and
therefore in Latin and Cyrillic script.
Even in Latin<->Cyrillic conversion, you have the same problems with
Russian loanwords (Uzbek "ÑÐÐÐÑÑ" > "yanvar" being a borderline case,
but what about "ÐÑÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÑÐÑ" > "vulkanizasiya"?) or Western proper names.
As a very simple example, "Sudan" in Turkish or Azerbaijani can be
the name of a country or it can mean "from water", and the correct
Arabic spellings are likely to be very different, and can be
disambiguated only by complete parsing of the context.
I think in this particular case the spellings would be the same, but the
point is valid nonetheless, of course.
Philipp
--
So wichtig wie die Braut zur Trauung
ist Bullrichsalz fÃr die Verdauung!
- Bullrich-Salz, 1951
