Re: Tech: Unicode (was...)
From: | John Cowan <cowan@...> |
Date: | Thursday, May 6, 2004, 12:39 |
Philippe Caquant scripsit:
> The Latin tranlisteration is of course not satisfactory, because
> everybody will use his own transliteration, just as I do when I'm
> trying to transliterate Russian for ex.
Distinguish between transliteration and transcription.
Transliteration is letter-by-letter and independent of language,
though its particular conventions may be of course influenced
by one language or another; still, once we have agreed on it,
it works. The standard Latin-alphabet transliteration of
Tibetan is hopelessly misleading about pronunciation, but it
does permit exact reconstruction of the original Tibetan-script text.
Transcription is more ad-hoc, is from language to language, and
may or may not be reversible.
--
[W]hen I wrote it I was more than a little John Cowan
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in the benignancy of vegetables. --And Rosta www.reutershealth.com