Arabic-L:LING:Transcription

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Thu 07 Jul 2010
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1) Subject: Transcription

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1)
Date: 07 Jul 2010
From: Charles Butterworth <cebworth at gvpt.umd.edu>
Subject: Transcription

Dear Colleagues,

Many thanks to Kurt Vikor for this  full statement about
transliteration systems.  It serves as a perfect complement to my own
very brief message about the IJMES and EI systems.  From my own
experience, I find that scholars in France, Germany, and Italy prefer
the old EI system.  For me, however, it is far too cumbersome.

And to this list should be added the system introduced several years
ago by Isma'il Faruqi and now adopted by the International Institute of
Islamic Thought in all of its many publications.

But two of the acronyms used by Mr. Vikor in his message leave me
puzzled.  Would he or someone else please spell them out.

1.  IPA 

2.  ISO 

Many thanks,

Charles Butterworth


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2)
Date: 07 Jul 2010
From: "Knut S. Vikør" <knut.vikor at ahkr.uib.no>
Subject: Transcription




> But two of the acronyms used by Mr. Vikor in his message leave me
> puzzled.  Would he or someone else please spell them out.
> 
> 1.  IPA 

Internationial Phonetic Alphabet
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipa>

> 
> 2.  ISO 

International Standards Organization, strictly speaking its transliteration standard number 233 for Arabic, so "ISO 233". It was a very complex system that used the "single Latin character for single Arabic character" principle, but with many special characters to impose absolute correspondence Arabic/Latin (ta marbuta was written as a t with diaresis / two dots above, sukun had to be indicated as ° , degree sign, between the consonants, the definite article was written: hamza - small superscript dotless i - a - l, and so on.) Basically it required quite some knowledge of grammar to get its i'rab rules quite right. Because it was an international standard, it was actually "imposed" by our national library catalogue body, until someone had to start input Arabic material and it was quietly dropped for LC. Still, some libraries in continental Europe may still use it (I am not sure how well it survived computerization with its idiosyncratic characters). 
<http://transliteration.eki.ee/pdf/Arabic_2.2.pdf>

As for the old EI system, its main problem was the double characters th, sh, kh, dh, dj, gh which all should be written thus, but underlined. Computerwise, Brill had a special font with these as separate characters, but that was of course non-standard, so users were increasingly forced to use regular underline formatting instead, which was not ideal. More logical, probably, and well used in Europe is to use a systematic "single character" system, where th and dh becomes t/d with line under, gh is g with dot above, etc.; these characters all exist as separate characters in contemporary computer systems and it works. Still, it requires more special characters than the IJMES or LC systems.

Knut S.


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End of Arabic-L:  07 Jul 2010


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