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

Tue Mar 31 12:51:40 UTC 2020

The issue mentioned by David and Randy also arises with names from India. The well-known Tamil expert E. Annamalai once told me that he had just a single name, "Annamalai", and that he added the "abbreviated given name E." merely in order to fit into the expectations of foreigners. (His father's name began with "E", so this seemed the least arbitrary choice.)

And in Europe, a frequent issue is how to find Dutch names (because in the Dutch tradition, the "surname proclitics" do not count for alphabetic sorting, and they vary in spelling depending on the context).

So it may not be an exaggeration to say that each naming tradition has its own categories, just as each language hs its own categories.

To be sure, we want to compare names across naming traditions, so we need comparative concepts. In the Generic Style Rules<https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistics/past-research-resources/resources/generic-style-rules.html>, the proposal is to have an obligatory surname field, and an optional given name field – so the Indian/Tibetan names are not anomalous (because the given name is optional), and neither would the Dutch names (because the surnames would be treated uniformly). It seems that this would be largely compatible with the practices of most publishers.

It may be possible to have even more complex systems (along the lines suggested by Christian), but I think the beauty of the Generic Style Rules is that they are only 14 pages long. They specify a number of fixed rules, but otherwise leave a lot of freedom. (In contrast, the APA manual is over 200 pages long, costs €35, and contains some ancient rules that are culturally insensitive, so put it mildly.)

Best,
Martin

On 31.03.20 14:14, David Gil wrote:

Dear all,

It seems there's a (welcome) consensus that we need to include non-Latin scripts in our citations.  But Liu Danqing's latest post reminds me that there is a different but related issue pertaining not to the script but rather to the "grammar" of the name, even when it's in Latin script.  This problem is particularly acute in (though certainly not limited to) names in Malay/Indonesian, where even within Indonesia, people of different ethnicities have names associated with different structures.  For example, a name such as Soenjono Dardjowidjojo (a prominent Indonesian linguist) is often treated as though Dardjowidjojo were his surname and Soenjono his first name, and therefore alphabetized under "D" and cited as, e.g. "Dardjowidjojo (1965)", whereas according to local conventions, Soenjono is his most important name, and he should actually be alphabetized under "S" and cited as, e.g. "Soenjono (1965)".  But other Indonesians have different name structures, and some structure their names in the western way, namely first name plus surname.  When referring to Indonesian authors, I find it very challenging to refer to each author in the correct way, and probably end up making quite a few mistakes in doing so.  (Sorry: I don't have an easy solution to offer, I just wanted to draw attention to the problem, which, as I said above, is not specific to Malay/Indonesian.)

Best wishes,

David

On 31/03/2020 19:30, LIU Danqing wrote:
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><mailto: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><mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Daniel Ross <djross3 at gmail.com><mailto:djross3 at gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, March 31, 2020 9:17 AM
To: Joo, Ian
Cc: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto: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<mailto: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

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