12.2760, Sum: Informal Romanized Orthographies

[LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List:  Vol-12-2760. Mon Nov 5 2001. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 12.2760, Sum: Informal Romanized Orthographies

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1)
Date:  Sun, 04 Nov 2001 13:04:56 +0400
From:  "David Palfreyman" <David.Palfreyman at zu.ac.ae>
Subject:  Informal Romanized orthographies

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Sun, 04 Nov 2001 13:04:56 +0400
From:  "David Palfreyman" <David.Palfreyman at zu.ac.ae>
Subject:  Informal Romanized orthographies

Here is my summary of the replies I received about the use of an informal
Roman orthography system by students (e.g. Arabs) in internet contexts.

Many thanks to the following who replied: ttseli at yahoo.com , benedetta at Free
Net.co.uk , pietsch at mail.uni-freiburg.de , thodoris at essex.ac.uk ,
alexis.dimitriadis at let.uu.nl , johannes.heinecke at rd.francetelecom.com
(Greek); spolsb at mail.biu.ac.il (Arabic/Hebrew); zev.bar-Lev at sdsu.edu
(Hebrew); wordlover at kcbi.net (Amharic); churchh at crossmyt.com (Greek,
Arabic); mls33 at cam.ac.uk (Arabic, Hausa, Fulani, Japanese); nigel at elgin.fre
e-online.co.uk (Persian, Turkish); smccartney at mail.utexas.edu , picard at vax2
.concordia.ca (IPA); Chad.Nilep at colorado.edu (Japanese); wenchao at usa.net ,
a9305416 at unet.univie.ac.at (Chinese); pakendorf at eva.mpg.de (Russian);
d.buncic at uni-bonn.de (Croatian, Russian); engafg at ARTS-01.NOVELL.LEEDS.AC.UK
 (Bengali, Chinese); iad at math.bas.bg (Bulgarian); Loyd.W.Mowry at Dartmouth.ED
U (English); wertheim at socrates.Berkeley.EDU (Tatar); viralbus at daimi.au.dk
(Georgian).

The media referred to included informal emails, chatrooms, instant
messaging, websites and typewritten communication.

People who use romanization include non-linguists, as well as linguists
(who have their own more or less standardized orthographies, e.g. H, 9 for
Arabic pharyngeals) and proto-linguists (e.g. linguistics students who are
asked to render their native language for people not familiar with their
script).

The functional motivation for such orthographies is the difficulty of
typing certain characters using ASCII.  Sometimes a previously used
Romanization standard becomes unusable because it is not easily typeable
(e.g. Berber; Chinese tones when represented as diacritics).  However,
even when fonts are available the phenomenon often lives on, e.g. among
Arab students whose computers are Arabic enabled but still use Romanization
 for privacy, 'cool value', etc.

The choice of which ASCII symbols to use for particular sounds include:

a)  Use of 'spare letters' not used otherwise in the orthography for that
language (often q, x, w).  E.g. <w> for Georgian /tS/.  This sometimes
seems to be motivated by keyboard layout (e.g. <x> for 'soft sign' in
Russian, which is assigned to the X key on the ASCII keyboard)

b) Visual similarity as well as or instead of sound (e.g. <8> or <0> for
Greek theta, <H> for Greek eta; <w> for Hebrew /sh/ - in all these cases
the ASCII character resembles visually (rather than phonologically) a
character in the language's own script).  Cyrillic languages, however,
seem to use more phonological/traditional Romanization (e.g. <kh>).

c) Initial sounds in familiar words (e.g. <4> and <6> for /ch/ and /sh/ in
Bulgarian, where the Bulgarian words for these numbers (chetiri 3D 4 and
shest 3D 6) begin with the phoneme in question.

d) Orthography of other Roman-alphabet languages familiar to the writer
(e.g. French-type <ou> for /u/ in Moroccan Arabic, <y> and <j> for /j/ in
Persian speakers living in Anglophone and German-speaking countries
respectively).

e)  IPA (e.g. <x> for /x/ in Georgian).

Hard-to-type Roman characters (e.g. diacritics in Croat or Turkish) are
generally just omitted, but sometimes doubled letters or upper case are
used to signal the distinction).

Digraphs are often used, eg. in Esperanto <cx>, <gx> for <c>, <g> with
circumflex).  Also <'>, e.g. '7 for the dotted 7 character in Arabic, <'b>
in Hausa/Fulani, or to indicate front vowels in Tatar.
Such orthographies occur even in very widely-used languages which use
Roman characters, e.g. French.

These orthographies are mostly variable, even within one message from a
single author.

*Other interesting issues*:

Historical change and old/new orthographies.  E.g. Arabic orthography is
based on Classical Arabic, thus not reflecting variety and changes in
vernacular Arabic.   NB: Tatar has had four alphabets this century, under
the influence of Islam, the USSR and Westernization.
In Taiwan: phonological uses of Chinese ideograms (using ideograms which
represent the vernacular sound rather than the meaning of what you want to
write).  Use of Chinese ideograms to write English (again, according to
the pronunciation of the ideograms).   Use of non-Roman phonological
representation, e.g. Zhuyin Fuhao in Taiwan.

Psycho- and sociolinguistics: what informal orthographies show about
speakers' perceptions/ processing of their own language.  Ease of
comprehension by native speakers (e.g. Turks have little problem understand
ing Turkish written without diacritics), and by non-native speakers (e.g.
a more transparent new informal orthography for Amharic may be easier than
one which uses English sound-letter correspondences but loses certain
phonemic distinctions).  20

Speaker language choice?  E.g. Chinese students in Beijing may choose to
email each other in English rather than trying to represent Chinese in
ASCII.

Psycholinguistic representations vs linguists' representations (e.g. IPA);
and representations current in certain social circles vs. official (e.g.
state-promoted) representations. Representation of boundaries (e.g. spaces
put between root and bound morpheme in Romanized Japanese).

Disputes about how to represent sounds.  Speakers' representations of the
phenomenon of Romanization (e.g. Russian "pisat' po-pol'ski", i.e. "write
in Polish", since Polish uses a Roman alphabet).

Numbers and letters as phonological ideograms (e.g. <OK m8> for English
"OK, mate";  Taiwan Chinese  <AV8D> for English "everybody" - the Chinese
for 8 is "ba", so "A-V-ba-D" is pronounced like "everybody").  This kind
of usage seems to be fairly standardized: speed but also cool value?

*Technical issues*: characters may be entered OK by the writer of an
email, but arrive transformed or even deleted.  Unicode as a solution to
this?

*Web and other resources*:

http://www.unicode.org/unicode/faq/basic_q.html
http://www.payvand.com/gerdsooz/intro.html
http://www.elgin.free-online.co.uk
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, no 150, on digraphia.


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