Talk:Scientific transliteration

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An entry from Scientific transliteration appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? column on 9 February 2006.

[edit] Questions

Thanks to Mzajac for creating this useful page. A few points:

1. Would you mind if we moved the page to Scientific transliteration of Cyrillic? I'm sure there are scientific transliteration schemes for other scripts too.
2. I'd like to question the use of "phonemic" in the introduction. In fact, this strikes me as almost a contradiction in terms: A transliteration (as opposed to transcription) system is by definition concerned with a 1-to-1 relationship between graphemes, not phonemes. This excludes a 1-to-1 relationship of graphemes in the target script with phonemes in the source language(s). Unless it so happens that all the source language orthographies have in turn an exact 1-to-1 relationship between their native graphemes and phonemes. Which is hardly the case in any language, and surely not in all the Cyrillic/Slavic ones? For instance, I take it that Russian <ё> and <o> really involve the same phoneme, /o/, don't they? In that case, a transliteration system that treats them differently is, by definition, not phonemic.

Lukas ^(T.|@) 17:31, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

1. I'd rather keep it at the simpler title, as this is by far the most common name (although most commonly in a Slavistics context), and I've never heard of any other scientific transliterations. I suggest we leave it until another one does appear, in which case it's easy enough to move it to the disambiguating title. In principle: don't disambiguate if you don't know there's a reason to.
2. Perhaps the wording could be improved, but there definitely is a phonemic principle behind the scheme, and it is based on the phonemic Croatian & Serbian alphabets' correspondence. In some cases, I think the transliterated text better reflects a language's phonemics than the original Cyrillic, for example the separation of j from most iotified vowels (я=ja, ю=ju, є=je, ї=ji) and щ=šč, although it isn't strictly one phoneme per letter, such as in the е≠je and ë≠jo examples. It also has a unique transliteration scheme respecting the phonetic characteristics of each Slavic language. This linguists' scheme contrasts sharply with ISO 9, which strictly relates to letter-forms and ignores phonemics—probably the favourite system of a file clerk.

—Michael Z. 2006-02-07 18:11 Z

• google "Scientific transliteration" - first hit arab. IMO: move the article.
• can ISO 9 be added to the table?

Tobias Conradi (Talk) 18:23, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

I see several references, but that first hit is merely a description in the title of an article about the Al-Sana’ah Transliteration System (STS). There's zero mention in the articles on romanization and transliteration.

Does anyone know if scientific transliteration for Arabic is consistent with this system, or does it belong in its own separate article? —Michael Z. 2006-02-07 20:45 Z

I've added ISO 9:1995 to the table. —Michael Z. 2006-02-07 21:58 Z

---google.com for [scientific translation] start with result 2---

Arabic transliteration - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia A full "scientific" transliteration, on the other hand, will make use of diacritics that may be unfamiliar to untrained readers. ... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_transliteration - 45k - Cached - Similar pages

--- A Guide to Hebrew Transliteration In scientific transliteration this can be represented as either a "t" (underlined ) or "th". The "Sepharadic" modern Israeli pronunciation does not use the ... www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/RelS367/transliteration.html - 11k - Cached - Similar pages

--- Transliteration and pronunciation of ancient Egyptian The following tables lists some frequently used hieroglyphs, their hieratic counterparts, their scientific transliteration and how some people think they ... nefertiti.iwebland.com/people/transliteration.htm - 11k - Cached - Similar pages

Tobias Conradi (Talk) 10:21, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Our article Transliteration of Greek to the Latin alphabet uses the term "scientific". Ardric47 04:07, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Actually, when I clicked on the link from Romanization of Russian, I was expecting to see "scientific transliteration" schemes for several different languages, especially since I knew of the one for Greek. Ardric47 04:11, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Page move?

Okay, it sounds like this should be moved to scientific transliteration of Cyrillic text, scientific transliteration for Cyrillic, or scientific transliteration of Cyrillic. Can anyone offer a basic general definition of the term scientific transliteration, for a stub article? —Michael Z. 2006-02-17 04:37 Z

I don't really think that we would need any. Right now it would be little more than a dicdef ("A scientific transliteration is a transliteration scheme that is generally agreed on for scientific use in a given field of study" or something to that effect.) I think no harm would be done if we just moved the article the normal way, with an automatic redirect from the present title. No prejudice against somebody later creating a new article here, with perhaps a list of "scientific" translation schemes for different scripts, if anybody sees a need for such. Lukas ^(T.|@) 09:03, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

I would use "scientific transliteration of Cyrillic". the "of" is very common in WP article titles, "Cyrillic text" is not really needed and the whole would be schemed like "Romanization of XY". redirect is fine, everybody is free to make it a dab or stub. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 10:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Okay, but moving this article and leaving a redirect here doesn't help the basic problem: when a reader like Ardric47, above, clicks the link and ends up at this article with no mention of other scientific transliterations. —Michael Z. 2006-02-17 15:17 Z

[edit] Merge

This seems to be (largely) the same as ISO/R 9:1968, which is featured in the ISO 9 article alongside ISO 9:1995. Therefore I think the articles should be merged. “Scientific transliteration” is not an unambiguous lemma at all—you should go by the standard’s name (even if it is not ISO, but e.g. GOST or ALA/LoC), assuming it is a codified norm and not a loose convention. Christoph Päper 13:59, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

This article is about the traditional Cyrillic "scientific transliteration", in use since the nineteenth century, and still widely seen in older books. ISO/R 9:1968 was a late-1960s standardization of it, with a few differences, and is still used in Slavistics publications. ISO 9:1995 is a major revision, with a single table for all languages—since it effectively ignores the different languages' phonetics, I think it is more widely used by administrators of international organizations' than by linguists.

There is a large grey area between the two, but they are different, and used by different people and organizations. If anything, ISO/R 9:1968 may belong in this article at least as much as it does in the other.

If someone is to write a separate article about "scientific transliteration" for any other writing systems, then this one could be moved to Scientific transliteration of Cyrillic, but the subject of this article predates the ISO 9 codification by seventy years. —Michael Z. 2006-05-09 22:08 Z

I know about the differences quite well, now! As a matter of fact almost every member of any field that needs/uses conversion of Cyrillic into Latin letters seems to think of his system as the only or at least the “correctest” one. Slavists, geographers, immigration offices, sports federations etc. pp. often simply refer to the transliteration (or transcription) without mentioning the standard or some unambiguous name. Wikipedia doesn’t help novices by scattering the information over a number of articles (and even namespaces). After all the differences between standards, establishing an evolutionary chain, are small, at least for the common letters of Russian and elsewhere they lie mostly in the selection of diacritical marks or in increased language independence. (Transcriptions which are dependent on target and source language differ in more aspects and should therefore probably be dealt with separately.) — Christoph Päper 00:10, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

There are also collective articles on Romanization of Russian, Romanization of Ukrainian, etc., which summarize and compare the different systems. The point is that ISO 9 and Scientific Transliteration are used by different people in different fields. —Michael Z. 2006-05-31 14:51 Z

let me chime in and support a move to Scientific transliteration (Cyrillic) at least: there are other cases where scientific transliteration contrasts with loose or common transliteration systems, for example in the case of the Arabic alphabet. The title as it is, this not being a specifically Slavic work of reference, is too misleading. dab (ᛏ) 15:19, 9 October 2006 (UTC)