[Lingtyp] Why cite non-Latin-script literature ONLY in Latin script?

[Daniel Ross]

Thanks for this question. I'd love to join in the discussion by saying that
from my perspective, this practice is frustrating and harmful for my
productivity. Specifically, I often work with references not written in a
language that I know well. And it can take me a very long time to
reconstruct the original script representation of the for example romanized
Chinese to guess what the actual characters were in order to locate the
cited article. At that point I can slowly work through it using a mix of
dictionaries, Google Translate, etc. If from the perspective of a speaker
of these languages this is also a problem, then I would strongly suggest
the practice be ended immediately.

Of course there is a historical explanation: it was once very hard to type
out the scripts of non-Roman languages. But now that we've had unicode for
a long time actually, that's no longer a relevant reason. If it were, we'd
find journals publishing the titles of articles in Romanized characters
too, or at least listing them that way through search engines.

Daniel

On Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 12:10 AM Joo, Ian <joo at shh.mpg.de> wrote:

> Dear all,
>
>
>
> I would like to ask a question to everybody:
>
> When citing literature written in non-Latin script, why do some editors
> require it to be cited ONLY in Latin script?
>
> For example, this is how I would cite a Chinese book, when writing an
> article in English:
>
> Xùliàn旭练Lǐ李.*Láiyǔ yánjiū*倈语硏究. Zhōngguó xīn fāxiàn yǔyán yánjiū cóngshū中国
> 新发现语言研究丛书. Zhōngyāng mínzú dàxué chūbǎnshè中央民族大学出版社, Běijīng北京
>
> As you can see, in both the original script (Chinese) and Latin script. But
> some editors require it to be:
>
> Xùliàn Lǐ. *Láiyǔ yánjiū*. Zhōngguó xīn fāxiàn yǔyán yánjiū cóngshū.
> Zhōngyāng mínzú dàxué chūbǎnshè, Běijīng.
>
> But why would we not write the original script and ONLY write in Latin
> script?
>
> The point of citing literature is to enable the reader to go find and
> consult it themself.
>
> But when the author’s name is written as *Xùliàn Lǐ*, I have no idea how
> that would be written in Chinese, thus making it more difficult to find the
> literature when needed.
>
> So what is the logical purpose of requiring the article to be cited ONLY
> in Latin script?
>
> The only logical reason I can think of is that it saves some space – ca.
> one line per citation. But is that a good enough reason to make things
> harder for those actually wanting to find and read the cited work?
>
> I would like to hear your opinion on this matter.
>
> (I’m asking this question on Lingtyp mailing list, because our subfield
> makes it necessary for some of us to make extensive use of non-Latin-script
> literature.)
>
>
>
> From Daejeon,
>
> Ian
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20200331/82bcf168/attachment.htm>