Re: Steg's Hebrew Romanization

At 11:52 on 27.12.1998, Steg Belsky wrote:

> On Sun, 27 Dec 1998 13:17:36 +0000 "BP.Jonsson" <bpj@...> writes:
> >Steg, your ASCIIzations of Hebrew intrigues me.  Could you describe
> >the
> >principles? E.g., I wonder if {hh} and {tt} are Heth and Teth (or is
> >it Taw
> >-- as an Iranist I never remember the Semitic values right! :-0)
>
> Thanks, well, here goes:
>
> What i try to do is to distinguish the consonants and most of the vowels
> from eachother - this doesn't work that well since there are 10 vowels,
> plus 4 shvas (schwa and "hhattafim", i think they're called "ultrashort
> vowels), and 22 consonants some of which have two different sounds.  I
> think that capitalized letters in the middle of words are unaesthetic, so
> i stay away from those, and i use a few digraphs - which unfortunately
> makes me unable to show dagesh (gemination?) the way other people's
> transliterations due.
>
> Here's how i write each letter:
[snip]

My rendering of the Irano-Aramaic alphabet:

A B G D E W Z H @ Y K L M N S O P $ Q R C T
a b g d   w z h   y k l m n s o p j   r c t

It's common practice to use caps for Aramaic words.  They are not
distinguished graphically in the original script (except to the extent that
E @ Q appear in them, since these don't occur in native words) but they are
not read phonetically; instead the Iranian translation of the Aramaic word
is read.  Thus the spelling MLK is read as _shah_.  This is somewhat
similar to the way Kanji are used in Japanese, and just like the first
sound of a kana sometrimes hints at the last sound in the Kanji reading an
extra letter is often written to hint at the Iranian word that should be
pronounced, e.g. MLKhan for _shahan_ "kings".  You may be intrigued to
learn that _MLK ay ayran L LAyran_ is read: _shah-e-eran o aneran_ "king of
Iran and (of) not-Iran" (the L used for the conjunction _u_ "and" has a
peculiar shape, BTW; maybe I should use & for it :).  It's no problem using
A E O as I do, since there are no vowel marks in Pahlavi writing.  They
sometimes used dots to distinguish g and d, since b g d tended to look the
same when not final -- i.e. most of the time!  They also used l for /r/,
since w n o r all had deteriorated into a vertical line |.  To distinguish
them at all in transliteration is actually scholarly pedantry.  I don't
believe the Persian scribes were aware of w and o being two letters anyway,
and context normally disambiguates between w/o and n.  As you may have
guessed my choice of @ for Teth is because of graphic similarity to the
hebrew and Aramaic glyphs for the letter.

>
> and
>
> shva na` = E  (i considered making it @, like ASCII-IPA, but the @-symbol
> just looks too big to me to represent the sound.  If my emailprogram and
> conlanglist could understand eachother's accented-characters i would
> probably use something like an E with a fallingaccent)
Why not use ^ ?  It's tiny and it is similar to the IPA character for the
british vowel in _but_.

> Although, i've been having a problem lately trying to decide whether to
> keep putting H at the end of qamatz-hei words, or drop it since it's not
> "really" there (only putting it when there's a mapiq).
Why not use @ when there is no mapiq?  I use it for the occasional
ta-marbuta in modern Persian -- I don't really know modern Persian, but
Iranian and early western scholars often put Perso-Arabic glosses into the
Pahlavi MSS!

> -Stephen (Steg)
/BP