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

Tue Mar 31 11:30:05 UTC 2020

 Dear Walter and all:
I agree with Walter's comment about the citation of Chinese author names. Let me mention some figures.
  In China, where we have the population of 1.4 billion, some surnames are extremely frequent.
  Of each of the top three surnames, Zhang (for Taiwan spelling: Chang, and Hong Kong Cantonese spelling: Cheung), Wang (Cantonese: Wong), and Li (Hong Kong: Lee), we have around 100 million people. My Surname Liu is the fourth biggest one, with a population around 60 million . Even within linguistic field, we have many many Zhangs, Wangs and Lis.
  So, Chinese usually identifies a person by his/her full name, especially in academic citation. The information such as Li (1998) or Wang (2008) or Zhang, J. 2005, Liu, T. 2016 is much less informative than we need. 
  In addition, Chinese is a tone language. When we use Latin Script, the tone distinction between names is neutralized. 
So I prefer to keep longer forms for Chinese names in citation.

    On Tuesday, March 31, 2020, 4:59:12 PM GMT+8, Bisang, Prof. Dr. Walter <wbisang at uni-mainz.de> wrote:  

Dear Ian,

taking up Christian Lehmann's mail, I first want to say that I fully support your view.

Publishers may intend to save space but the consequences of that are that it may be hard to find and read the original paper. In many cases, these regulations even affect the author’s identification (and her/his rights). This can well be the case with Chinese authors. Given the frequency of some surnames (e.g. Zhang), one also needs to see the first name in Chinese characters. Citations of the type of "Zhang, J.", as they are common practice in many scientific journals, are not very helpful.Of course, the real pecialists may easily be able to identify an other author even if her/his name is only given in transcription, but this cannot be taken for granted as soon as a paper is written for a somewhat wider audience.Other languages with Non-Latin script come with other problems but the overall problem is rarely discussed. Let me just point out one additional problem, which is the absence of a standardized transcription or the existence of several competing systems of transcription.

As for your suggestion of how to cite Chinese publications, I'd suggest to translate the title into English as well (for those who cannot read and speak the language).

All the best,

Walter (Bisang)

From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Daniel Ross <djross3 at gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, March 31, 2020 9:17 AM
To: Joo, Ian
Cc: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Why cite non-Latin-script literature ONLY in Latin script? 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 becited 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 asXùliàn 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

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