[Lingtyp] Should we include original scripts for examples in typological publications?

[Konstantin Henke]

Dear Lingtyp members,

I hope this is not an old topic with a consensus I'm not aware of. If it is, please forgive me for re-opening it.

In the overwhelming majority of example sentences/forms in typological publications I do not see another line providing the original script where one exists for the surveyed language (Thai, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, certain Slavic languages, etc.). It might be a domain-specific thing (I've mostly been working with spatial semantics) but researchers in other domains may have been wondering about the same thing.

I understand that adding another written representation to the Latin transliteration does not serve the endeavor of typology, which is based on segments that are ideally naturally produced (i.e. spoken) and that especially non-phonemic/phonetic scripts do not add any value for the greater part of a broader audience of researchers and other readers. Instead, adding these scripts eats up space and may even be perceived as an unnecessary show-off with something that looks pretty or exotic.

Having studied in Taiwan, where Mandarin speakers even in the academic realm are often not familiar with Pinyin, the de-facto standard Latin transliteration of their language, I frequently witnessed them struggle to read examples presented in their very own language if Chinese characters are missing. China, on the other hand, is arguably a rather rare case where the academically used transliteration (Pinyin with tone diacritics) does happen to be almost the same as the most common input method on electronic devices (Pinyin without tone diacritics). I'm not sure if my observation in Taiwan generalizes well, but I wouldn't be surprised if fellow researchers from Thailand, Korea, Japan, Russia etc. struggled to read their language in Latin transliteration. I'm actually quite surprised to see a discipline concerned with freeing itself from Eurocentric bias care so little about its accessibility to non-European contributors and readers.

That said, I may be overlooking something in addition to the few counter-points mentioned above. I do empathize with the argument that a push for naturalistic data might imply the wish to rid oneself of the burden of written representation (but then we might as well just provide all examples of spoken data in IPA, which I have seen a few researchers do even for familiar IE languages). I would also understand the space question if it weren't for the fact that everyone just reads PDFs now anyways. Layout/font-related issues should hardly pose a problem in the age of Unicode, either. Am I missing something, or are we really just being lazy?

I'd appreciate any input!

Best,
Konstantin

PS: I'm obviously talking about cases where the original script adds readability for native speakers. Whether or not to add less commonly used scripts like Javanese to raise awareness or for similar reasons, is probably a different topic.
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