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Transliteration - Wikipedia
Transliteration - Wikipedia
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Definitions
Systematic transliteration is a mapping
from one system of writing into another,
typically grapheme to grapheme. Most
transliteration systems are one-to-one, so
a reader who knows the system can
reconstruct the original spelling.
Transliteration is opposed to
transcription, which maps the sounds of
one language into a writing system. Still,
most systems of transliteration map the
letters of the source script to letters
pronounced similarly in the target script,
for some specific pair of source and
target language. If the relations between
letters and sounds are similar in both
languages, a transliteration may be very
close to a transcription. In practice, there
are some mixed
transliteration/transcription systems that
transliterate a part of the original script
and transcribe the rest?
Difference from
transcription
In Modern Greek, the letters <η> <ι> <υ>
and the letter combinations <ει> <oι>
<υι> are pronounced [i] (except when
pronounced as semivowels), and a
modern transcription renders them all as
<i>; but a transliteration distinguishes
them, for example by transliterating to
<ē> <i> <y> and <ei> <oi> <yi>. (As the
ancient pronunciation of <η> was [ɛː], it is
often transliterated as an <e> with a
macron, even for modern texts.) On the
other hand, <ευ> is sometimes
pronounced [ev] and sometimes [ef],
depending on the following sound. A
transcription distinguishes them, but this
is no requirement for a transliteration.
The initial letter 'h' reflecting the
historical rough breathing in words such
as Ellēnikē should logically be omitted in
transcription from Koine Greek on,[2] and
from transliteration from 1982 on, but it
is nonetheless frequently encountered.
Challenges
A simple example of difficulties in
transliteration is the Arabic letter qāf. It is
pronounced, in literary Arabic,
approximately like English [k], except that
the tongue makes contact not on the soft
palate but on the uvula, but the
pronunciation varies between different
dialects of Arabic. The letter is
sometimes transliterated into "g",
sometimes into "q" and rarely even into
"k" in English.[3] Another example is the
Russian letter "Х" (kha). It is pronounced
as the voiceless velar fricative /x/, like
the Scottish pronunciation of ⟨ch⟩ in
"loch". This sound is not present in most
forms of English, and is often
transliterated as "kh", as in Nikita
Khrushchev. Many languages have
phonemic sounds, such as click
consonants, which are quite unlike any
phoneme in the language into which they
are being transliterated.
Adopted
Buckwalter transliteration
Devanagari transliteration
Hans Wehr transliteration
International Alphabet of Sanskrit
Transliteration
Scientific transliteration of Cyrillic
Transliteration of Ancient Egyptian
Transliterations of Manchu
Wylie transliteration
See also
International Components for Unicode
Latin script
List of ISO transliterations
Orthographic transcription
Phonemic orthography
Phonetic transcription
Romanization
Spread of the Latin script
Substitution cipher
Transcription (linguistics)
References
1. Kharusi, N. S. & Salman, A. (2011) The
English Transliteration of Place Names in
Oman. Journal of Academic and Applied
Studies Vol. 1(3) September 2011, pp. 1–
27 Available online at
www.academians.org
2. See Koine Greek phonology.
3. Language log
External links
Look up transliteration in Wiktionary, the
free dictionary.
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