Questions tagged [transliteration]
Notations used to represent the graphemes of one script using another one.
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How to distinguish [i] from [iː] in Cyrillic?
Renglish/Рэнглиш (not mine)
is an adaptation of Cyrillic for English. Most of the sounds seem ok, but how would you normally differentiate [i] in bit from the [iː] in beet using Cyrillic or would they ...
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3answers
150 views
Why the words for pineapple sound so similar in Hebrew and in German?
A word for "pineapple" in Hebrew is "אננס" and in German is "Ananas". The pronunciation of "אננס" in Hebrew and "Ananas" in German are so similar that I wonder if it is merely a coincidence or there ...
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1answer
38 views
How are the Ogham stones inscribed?
I earlier asked How to convert Old Irish Latin script to Ogham? and am not quite complete with the answer. I have a similar question still trying to dig into how to build an Ogham generator. But ...
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1answer
35 views
How do you decode the CELT transcriptions?
Is it really this complicated? I am looking at this Irish text on the CELT (Corpus of Electronic Texts) website, and it looks like this (with page lines scattered around):
{MS folio 1a 1}IN ...
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0answers
32 views
When does cuneiform numbering “carry over”?
In theory, cuneiform glyphs are numbered to distinguish homophones: if there are two common glyphs pronounced /u/, one will be named U₁ and the other will be named U₂. If a glyph has multiple readings,...
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2answers
84 views
What is the point of transliteration that needs transliteration? Specifically, Mesoamerican languages
So I'm looking at a bag of "XOCHiTL" corn chips. The bag helpfully provides a pronunciation guide to the name, "so- cheel" with marks to indicate the accent is on the first syllable and long-O sound. ...
2
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1answer
180 views
Is Hebrew a language which can be transliterated programmatically according to a small set of clear rules?
English transliteration seems to require understanding the meaning of the expression you are transliterating. Anything that requires human-level intelligence to parse the sentence for transliteration/...
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2answers
62 views
How to build a robust transliteration scheme across languages?
So I am trying to imagine building a transliterator across languages that takes any language and converts it into IPA or some less-detailed equivalent (like a Romanization). I am thinking about ...
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2answers
72 views
Is it straightforward to map Arabic script to romanized pronunciation?
I am not concerned with the exact IPA pronunciation, which might depend on dialect and culture and other factors. Instead I'm wondering if it's relatively straightforward to "transliterate" Arabic ...
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1answer
201 views
How are cuneiform glyphs numbered?
In Sumerian (and thus Akkadian, Hittite, etc) cuneiform, there are often several glyphs which have the same pronunciation (as far as we can tell). So the glyphs pronounced /u/ will be transliterated ...
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1answer
194 views
When was the name of Wales first attested in Romanian, and in which form?
As a native speaker, I am amazed that in Romanian the name of Wales, when it was introduced, very probably in the 19th century, was translated as Ţara Galilor, literally "Country of the Gauls", unlike ...
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1answer
258 views
Excepting Romanian, was “Wales” ever translated/transliterated in modern times outside English with the same term as that meaning “Gaul” or “Gauls”?
I have noticed that in Romanian the name of Wales is Ţara Galilor, which literally means Country of the Gauls or "Gauls-land". I consider this not just unusual, something that is not present in other ...
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0answers
65 views
How to transliterate Devanagari into Brahmi (mainly, diacritics)
I have been messing around with converting a large Devanagari Sanskrit text to Brahmi using a simple mapping function. There is also this table showing how most of the characters map. I found one that ...
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3answers
13k views
Why do English transliterations of Arabic names have so many Qs in them?
I remember when the Muslim holy book was the Koran when I was in middle school, but now it's the Quran. But it's always been Qatar and Iraq (but still Kuwait.)
Who decided that 'Q' was going to be ...
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3answers
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How do we know for sure a transliteration is lossless?
Looking at this it says it's lossless (Wylie Transliteration).
ག ga
ང nga
ཉ nya
ན na
What if you had sequences like ནག (ng, or is it naga)? Is it lossless because we can guarantee that every ...
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3answers
624 views
What is the purpose of transliteration?
On the Wylie Tibetan Transliteration page (original paper), it says:
Previous transcription schemes sought to split the difference with the result that they achieved neither goal perfectly. Wylie ...
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1answer
64 views
How to transliterate/transcribe/romanize Ancient Egyptian
I've already asked about how to rewrite the hieroglyphs using Unicode, which requires using Gardiner's List (over 1000 hieroglyphs). However, if you look at Wikipedia's Transliterating Ancient ...
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1answer
118 views
Why is there no standard romanization scheme for Arabic?
There have been several romanization schemes for the Chinese languages over the years, and in recent decades we seem to have settled in Pinyin as the system of choice. There doesn't seem to be a ...
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3answers
1k views
Why is “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani” transliterated with a Chi in Matthew and Mark?
In Matthew 27:46 (Mark 15:34), Jesus says "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani (σαβαχθανί)", which is translated "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?".
Why is this supposedly Aramaic word ...
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2answers
92 views
Verifying these resources are accurate written representations for each language using Latin script
I am a bit confused by the languages that use the Latin script, not sure if the version of the Latin script they are using is a transliteration of something else, or if that is actually what the ...
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1answer
130 views
Why is it that Babylonian king names do not match their Akkadian equivalent?
I am trying to figure out why it is that Babylonian (and Assyrian) king names do not match their Akkadian transcription.
For example, in the one known inscription for Nabonassar, which is written in ...
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2answers
1k views
Why did some Hebrew words beginning with Yod become transliterated into Latin as “hi?”
This is something I noticed when reading some different older English bibles. Often times, it seems there was originally & traditionally a digraph (I guess) ⟨Hi⟩ where now the more proper letter ⟨...
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2answers
158 views
Abbreviations for pinyin and hepburn transliterations?
Are there 2 letter ISO codes for the pinyin or hepburn transliterations? If not, are there non-ISO abbreviations in common use? Thanks.
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1answer
182 views
How is it possible to use a single Latin alphabet for Persian which will represent ALL three standards?
How can there be a SINGLE standard Latin script (mainly for International purposes) which properly represent standard Iranian Persian, Afghan Persian and Tajik Persian.
Especially the different ...
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1answer
270 views
Transliteration-transcription method for ancient Greek & Arabic
I am currently working on a paper that deals with a Psalm from the Septuagint known as the Violet fragment - LXX, Psalm 77.The particular verses i am interested in, are written in Greek uncials, ...
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1answer
151 views
Why is ⟨Г⟩ in Belarusian commonly Anglicised as ⟨h⟩, not ⟨g⟩?
The Cyrillic letter Ge (Г) is often Anglicised as ⟨g⟩. However, this depends on its pronunciation within each source language. Ge in Ukrainian is closest to the English /h/, and is therefore ...
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1answer
214 views
Which Chinese Romanisation system is most intelligible to English speakers?
This may be a difficult question, because I've heard that pronunciation can vary greatly even within Chinese-speaking countries. I'm also not really aware of when Mandarin or Cantonese would be used; ...
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1answer
88 views
Transliteration of Cyrillic
I have created a language that uses the Cyrillic alphabet, but I'm unsure as to how I can transliterate these letters for English-speaking readers:
Ii - this is pronounced as a hard letter 'i', as in ...
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1answer
111 views
Has Russian to Spanish transliteration changed much over the centuries?
I want to know which norms might have governed the spelling of some Russian names which were written down in Spanish around around 1750 - 1850. A number of formal standards exist today, such as ISO 9, ...
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2answers
156 views
Are there any existing guidelines for romanizing Aynu Itak?
I've asked the same question over on Japanese Language Stack Exchange, but I think that the focus on the Japanese language alone will net few results overall. What I'm looking for is a standardized ...
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4answers
664 views
How to transliterate the following Arabic letters in English [closed]
I am interested in how to transcribe the following Arabic letters oh English. The letter "families" I Ann interested in are:
ع
غ
ر
and
ك
ق
ء
I think one of the first two would be a "gh", but not ...
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3answers
258 views
How are the three phonetically distinct Arabic h's transcribed in English?
In Arabic we have three types of "h" sounds, as in the following list:
ح
خ
ه
I would like to know, which of these sounds is commonly transcribed as "kh" in English, and how are the other two "h" ...
4
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1answer
183 views
When transliterating into the Latin alphabet, what does an apostrophe mean? [closed]
As an example, the Hebrew word for if can be written in the English alphabet as ’im. What does the apostrophe represent here?
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3answers
582 views
Why does IAST exist when IPA is there?
When IPA can incorporate most of the sounds with Roman like symbols. Why do we need IAST?
Why do we need yet another standard for representing Indic scripts/sounds? If non phone-city of Roman ...
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1answer
140 views
Where can I find a translation for romanized (english texted) sanskrit into english?
I am trying to find a translator link to change romanized or english texted sanskrit (as in bollywood and other Indian songs and chants) into actual english so that I can understand what the song ...
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1answer
507 views
How to Transcribe R-colored Vowels (ɝ, ɚ, ɑ˞,ɔ˞) in X-SAMPA?
I'm looking at the Arpabet page on Wikipedia, and note some entries like this:
Arpabet | IPA | Word Examples
ER | ɝ | her (HH ER0); bird (B ER1 D); hurt (HH ER1 T), nurse (N ER1 S)
Now, I'm ...
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2answers
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When transliterating English words to Korean, why does the first F become a ㅎ?
(EDIT: this question now has a new home at https://korean.stackexchange.com/)
(Please visit https://korean.stackexchange.com/ for questions about Korean language)
Most Korean words and sounds do not ...
3
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1answer
89 views
What do we call this phenomenon of the gap between media and everyday language?
In Persian, the word for nest is لانه, which is pronounced somehow as /lʌne/.
However, in everyday spoken language, people usually pronounce it as /lune/, and they usually write it as لونه.
So, ...
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1answer
1k views
Why was the name תאומא transliterated as Θωμᾶς (Thomas) rather than Τωμᾶς (Tomas)?
Thomas derives from Aramaic תאומא (cognate with the Hebrew תאום). My understanding was that Aramaic, like Tiberian Hebrew, had the fricative [θ] as a conditioned allophone for the plosive [t], and ...
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1answer
137 views
Do Persian Jews voice Hebrew ק?
I recently saw the Hebrew name יעקב transliterated into (American) English by Persian Jews as Yaghob. I find this curious (because the ע isn't transliterated, but that's a question for another time, ...
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2answers
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Why “Kampuchea” → “Cambodia”?
Many place names in English are anglicizations/transliterations of their native names. Of those, many place names in Asia seem to have undergone a change over the past few decades: they've gone from a ...
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1answer
91 views
What are the IPA equivalents for the special characters used to transscribe indian words?
When I try to read an article related to India (in particular indo-aryan languages) certain special characters emerge which I do not know how to pronounciate. For instance: Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini ...
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2answers
509 views
fattha, qasra, damma in google arabic translate
I am trying to learn Arabic using a combination of Arabic for Dummies (AFD) and Google Translate. AFD seems to use transliteration while Google uses actual script. However, there seem to be ...
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3answers
334 views
What feature(s) of Chinese language lead(s) to the city written in pinyin as “Kunming” to sound more like “kuiming / kweeming / kwəming”?
I'm currently hitchhiking through Yunnan, China and I've noticed that the city Kunming usually sounds more like "Kuiming" or "Kweeming" or "kwəming". Even Google Translate produces the last when you ...
4
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1answer
266 views
What is the Aramaic transliteration system used in the “Aramaic of Jesus” Wikipedia article?
The Wikipedia article "Aramaic of Jesus" contains many instances of transliterated Aramaic, using a system I have not seen before. Some of the notations are well-established, like ŝ for /ʃ/ and ...
4
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2answers
8k views
Korean syllable-final ㅅ in Hangul transcription of loanwords
Why are English loanwords ending in /d/ or /t/ systematically transcribed into Hangul syllables ending in ㅅ rather than ㄷ? This seems strange, since when ㅅ is followed by a vowel, the coda is realised ...
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1answer
3k views
What is the proper way to write Hindi phonetically in English?
I've noticed that when Hindi is I guess transliterated phonetically transcribed to the English Alphabet many of the letters are doubled to represent the correct sound that one would make if you were ...
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6answers
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What languages are the most similar to English?
I speak English and Bengali with similar proficiency, at least in the 'lower' registers of the languages. Since I was a small child in a bilingual home I've been struck by how, despite having ...
2
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1answer
686 views
Rules of Yale Romanization of Korean
This is kind of a specific question, though it appears there is no StackExchange forum for the Korean language...
What are the specific rules in Yale Romanization of Korean with regard to where to ...
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4answers
624 views
Why was מֹשֶׁה transliterated as [moʊzɨz]?
How did the name "מֹשֶׁה" come to be transliterated with a [z] at the end?
The OED entry notes that "Moses" derives from Biblical Hebrew "Mōšeh" and that the earliest attestations with a strident ...
