Script for Transliteration Report

History

• This has been going on since writing first began around 5000BC.
• Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, post the fall of the Ottoman Caliphate, spearheaded efforts to
modernize Turkey.
• On November 1, 1928, Atatürk enforced the immediate shift from Arabic script to Roman text
for the Turkish language, altering its direction from right to left to left to right.
• The transition aimed to sever ties with Turkey's 1,000-year Muslim heritage and embrace
Westernization.
• Initially traumatic for the nation, the populace gradually adapted to the new script, although
Atatürk himself continued handwriting letters in the old scripted Turkish until the 1960s.
• The previous Turkish script had been an adaptation of Arabic to suit Turkish phonetics,
making the shift to Roman script a significant leap for the population.
• Despite initial confusion, the populace adapted to the new transliterated letter forms,
integrating them into the established alphabet within a generation.
• Similar linguistic transitions occurred in Iran, where Arabic script was adapted for Persian
consonants and vowels, influencing other languages in Asia like Tajik and Urdu.
• The choice of script for a language carries political, religious, and social implications, as
demonstrated by the challenges faced when attempting to write English in Arabic script or
reading archaic Spanish in Arabic script (alhamiado).

Page 5: Transliteration is a type of conversion of a term or text from one script to another that involves
swapping letters.

Page 6: The purpose of this process is to make foreign content a little more accessible. For example,
if someone wants to type a letter in Russian or Greek on an English keyboard, they may use
transliteration. This way they will not have to press a complicated sequence of keys to get the Cyrillic
or Greek alphabet.

Transliteration helps people pronounce words and names in foreign languages. For transliteration,
the basic knowledge in morphology (the study of words), phonemes (smallest unit of speech)
and phonology (the study of the patterns of sounds) is required.

Page 7: Transliteration helps student to pronounce words that at first look impossible to pronounce
because of the odd-looking characters. For a new learner of a language, transliteration is vital.
Without transliteration, new speakers would struggle to learn how words are to be pronounced.

A translation tells us the meaning of words or expression of another language. But a transliteration
doesn’t tell us the meaning of words, it helps us pronounce them.

Page 8: Chinese word 面条. If you just wanted 面条 transliterated it would be mein (as in the Chinese
menu item lo mein).

Explanation: Mein does not tell you what the original word means in English, but it does help you
pronounce it the way a Chinese speaker would. If you wanted to translate the word it would be
noodles.

Greek word "γειά" into English, we'd get "geia"

Explanation: We haven't changed the meaning of the word, just how it's written so that an English
speaker can pronounce it.

Most native English speakers would struggle to guess the pronunciation of words written in the Arabic
script or the Greek alphabet. But after transliteration, it’s at least possible to read and maybe even
pronounce a given word.

If you want someone who speaks a different language to understand your words, translation is the
service you need. If you are only interested in making your words more readable for people who use
different scripts, you can use transliteration.