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

[Cat Butz]

Yes. Who are we to decide the language's script is not worth including?

---
Cat Butz (she)
HHU Düsseldorf
General Linguistics


Am 14/11/2025 18:25, schrieb Konstantin Henke via Lingtyp:
> 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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