Transliteration standards

Sat Dec 6 00:48:54 UTC 1997

Transliteration standards

I am the chair of the International Organization for Standardization
subcommittee responsible for transliteration (ISO/TC46/SC2:
Conversion of Written Languages). This met from 12-14 May 1997 at the
British Standards Institution in Chiswick, London, to review
international standards in this area - both already published and
under development.

It also has an email list (see below): at present Cyrillic and
Glaglolitc scripts have been under discussion.

I am interested in any participation that you or any of your
colleagues may be able to undertake, either in meetings or
electronically, given your own necessary involvment in the
multilingual use of computers.

Despite computing standards like ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode, there
will always be a need for transliteration as long as people do not
have the same level of competence in all scripts besides the script
used in their mother-tongue, and may have a need to deal with these
languages, or when they have to deal with mechanical or computerised
equipment which does not provide all the scripts of characters that
they need.

The secretary (Evangelos Melagrakis from Greece) and I intend to make
transliteration and ISO/TC46/SC2 far more visible and far more
relevant to end users than it has been in the past. To enable this,
an electronic mailing list for ISO/TC46/SC2 (tc46sc2 at elot.gr) and an
associated Web site (located at www.elot.gr/tc46sc2) has now been set
up by ELOT (the Greek national standards body). We hope this list
will attract researchers and scientists who can add useful
information which might assist in developing standards on the
Conversion of Written Languages.

Scope of transliteration work in ISO/TC46/SC2's working groups.

[WG1:] Transliteration of Cyrillic (work now combined with that of WG5)
[WG2:] Transliteration of Arabic (work now combined with that of WG11)
 WG3:  Transliteration of Hebrew
 WG4:  Transliteration of Korean
 WG5:  Transliteration of Greek, Armenian, Georgian and Cyrillic
 WG6:  Transliteration of Chinese
 WG7:  Transliteration of Japanese
 WG8:  Transliteration and computers
 WG9:  Transliteration of Thai
 WG10: Transliteration of Mongolian
 WG11: Transliteration of Perso-Arabic script
 WG12: Transliteration of Indic scripts

SCRIPTS USED IN OFFICIAL LANGUAGES WORLDWIDE, AND SOME COMMON ORIGINS

NB: if necessary, to avoid distortion, resize your viewer/printer if
the word "origins" in the above line is not at the end of a line, and
view or print with a fixed pitch font (Courier at 12 point or smaller
is suggested).

   Latin   Cyrillic                Devanagari - - - Tibetan
      \     /                   /  Gujarati
       \   / - Armenian        /   Bengali           _ Mongolian
        \ /                   /    Gurumukhi        /
       Greek - Georgian      /     Oriya        SOGDIAN    Chinese
         |                  /                   SCRIPT    /
         |                 /       Telugu                /
     PHOENICIAN         BRAHMI - - Kannada       SINITIC - Japanese
    /  SCRIPT  \        SCRIPT     Malayalam      SCRIPT \
   /     |      \          \       Tamil                  \
Hebrew   |      Arabic      \                              Korean
         |        \          \ - - Sinhala
         |                    \
         |          \          \ _ Burmese
         |                      \  Khmer
         |            \          \
      Ethiopic     Divehi         \ _ Thai
     (Ethiopia,   (Maldives)          Lao
      Eritrea)

  PHOENICIAN, BRAHMI, SOGDIAN and SINITIC scripts are no longer in
  use as such, but all other scripts listed above (used in 99% of the
  world's languages) can trace their ancestry back to these. The East
  Asian scripts listed above have a slightly more complex link:
  Chinese characters (hanzi in Chinese) still use similar shapes to
  the Sinitic characters used around 1200 BC.

  The Japanese and Korean scripts use Chinese characters (kanji in
  Japanese) together with their own phonetic script (kana in
  Japanese). Korean now often uses only the phonetic script (hangul)
  without using Chinese characters (hanja).

  Scripts not used at state level, and other historical scripts, are
  not shown above, except for the four scripts listed in capitals
  above, from which most other scripts are derived.

The tc46sc2 at elot.gr list on transliteration

There are quite a few with an interest in transliteration in library
catalogues on the list, but there are other potential users of
transliteration too.

One major advantage of email is the ability to involve far more
people in the development of a common purpose than were involved
before, to get user feedback, and expert opinion from various
sources. There are now over 270 subscribers to tc46sc2 at elot.gr, from
43 countries and territories, providing a global interest group in
this area, covering all the scripts shown above.

Subscribing to the mailing list for ISO/TC46/SC2

In order to join the list you should be actively involved in using
transliteration systems, or in developing transliteration systems,
and should be prepared to contribute to the list from time to time.

If you wish to join the list, send an email to

        majordomo at elot.gr

with this message in the body of the text:

        subscribe tc46sc2 your at email.address

(but with your real email address replacing the string
your at email.address).

To find out further commands you can use, send the command "help" as
the text of an email either to tc46sc2-request at elot.gr or to:
majordomo at elot.gr To unsubscribe, send the command "unsubscribe"
instead, omitting the "quotes" marks in both cases. This will tell
you how to obtain copies of past messages etc., and other useful
features.

Once you are subscribed, you can send messages to tc46sc2 at elot.gr and
receive messages from other members of the list. Please reply where
possible to the list as a whole, so that all can benefit: using the
Group Reply function (pressing G on some email software) is the
simplest way to achieve this.

Other members will also be interested to see who else is joining the
list, so it is useful to send a brief introduction (say, one or two
short paragraphs) to tc46sc2 at elot.gr at the outset, saying what
languages, scripts and other things you are involved in. That is the
most likely way to stimulate others to write on the subjects you are
interested in!

I look forward to seeing new participants on this list. Please feel
free to forward this to anyone else who may be interested in
transliteration standardisation issues, and to send any queries about
the list to me.

                             Yours sincerely

                     John Clews and Evangelos Melagrakis

(Chair & Secretary of ISO/TC46/SC2: Conversion of Written Languages)

--
J. Clews, SESAME, 8 Avenue Road, Harrogate, HG2 7PG, England
Email: Converse at sesame.demon.co.uk;   tel: +44 (0) 1423 888 432

E. Melagrakis, ELOT, 313 Acharnon Str., GR-111 45 Athens, Greece
Email: eem at elot.gr                           tel: +30 1 201 9890