Questions tagged [transliteration]
Notations used to represent the graphemes of one script using another one.
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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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68 views
Is there a collection of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic transliterations of foreign names/words?
The Ancient Egyptians sometimes had to transliterate foreign names (for example, the name Cleopatra) into hieroglyphs, and I'm sure there are loanwords or technical terms from other contemporary ...
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1answer
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Deruny, deruni or deryni? [closed]
What is the correct spelling of potato pancakes, If we take the Russian or Ukrainian origin of the word? Deruny, deruni or deryni?
A google search for the etymology says deryny
And Wikipedia:
Potato ...
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3answers
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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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1answer
62 views
Is Arabiv ی is romanized/transliterated as u with a line above it?
As you can see in this link, Banu Hashem is not بنوهاشم, but بنی هاشم in Arabic.
But u is used mostly for و and not for ی.
I'm puzzled here and I can't find a good answer for this.
Could you please ...
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2answers
87 views
Does SAFFA count as a transliteration source? [closed]
http://www.hebrewworks.com/Transliteration.htm
Since the transliterations produced with this program are customizable, I was wondering if this program counts as a source for the existence of the ...
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1answer
54 views
Polish transliteration of בֵּית, בֵית, הֵא, פֵּא, פֵא, רֵישׁ [closed]
How would you transliterate the letter names בֵּית, בֵית, הֵא, פֵּא, פֵא, רֵישׁ in order to make it as clear as possible to an English speaker that you were using the Polish pronunciation of צירי as [...
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2answers
73 views
What should I do when transliterating Hebrew letter/vowel names?
I don't like using a transliteration if I haven't seen it being used elsewhere first, but I just can't find some of the spellings I want to use. My concern is this: If e.g. "yhhuh" isn't an ...
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Transliteration/Transcription of מְלאוּפּם [closed]
Notice that there is no vowel point under the פּ. This should probably be considered to be because of the fact that Hebrew is usually written without vowels, but I've never seen it written with a ...
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How to distinguish [i] from [iː] in Cyrillic? [closed]
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
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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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43 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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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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2answers
88 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. ...
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1answer
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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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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
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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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Why the prevalence of “ph” in transliteration?
Why is "ph" used so often (as opposed to "f") to transliterate the Hebrew "fei" sound into English?
Examples:
Alef - 17.5 million Google hits (MGh)
Aleph - 13.8 MGh
Seraf - 0.9 MGh
Seraph - 23.4 MGh
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1answer
164 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
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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
238 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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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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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
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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
217 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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3answers
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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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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
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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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1answer
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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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2answers
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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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2answers
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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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1answer
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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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2answers
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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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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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1answer
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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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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 ...
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1answer
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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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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" ...
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1answer
229 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
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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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3answers
615 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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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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4answers
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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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2answers
566 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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1answer
215 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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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 ...
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1answer
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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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1answer
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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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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 ...