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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 febrile with foodpoisoning from an antique carrot jcowan@reutershealth.com that I foolishly ate out of an illjudged faith www.ccil.org/~cowan in the benignancy of vegetables. --And Rosta www.reutershealth.com