85
votes
Why do English transliterations of Arabic names have so many Qs in them?
In Arabic, in fact, they've always been separate sounds! The sound we write "K" is spelled with the letter ك in Arabic, and is pronounced a little bit further forward in the mouth; the sound we write "...
- 64.1k
25
votes
Accepted
Why did some Hebrew words beginning with Yod become transliterated into Latin as "hi?"
Greek had the /h/ phoneme only at the beginning of a word, and it was marked with a diacritic (rough breathing sign) rather than with a letter. Koine Greek lost the /h/ phoneme and early manuscripts (...
- 2,765
17
votes
Accepted
Why is "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani" transliterated with a Chi in Matthew and Mark?
The Aramaic word שבקתני would probably have been pronounced /ʃabaqtani/. Usually, as you note, the /q/ of Aramaic is transliterated as κ, so σαβακθανι /sabaktʰani/ would be expected. However, in Greek,...
- 2,765
13
votes
Why do English transliterations of Arabic names have so many Qs in them?
I was going to propose Julius Klaproth, in his 1823 book Asia Polyglotta. He notates the difference between ك and ق as k versus q. In earlier works such as Hamer 1806 Ancient alphabets
both were ...
- 82.2k
13
votes
Why do English transliterations of Arabic names have so many Qs in them?
The answer to this question has multiple layers. Draconis has already noted that the two sounds are distinct (phonemic) in Arabic and user6726 has added that the convention of writing one using k and ...
- 1,160
12
votes
Excepting Romanian, is "Wales" ever translated/transliterated in modern languages with the same term as that meaning "Gaul" or "Gauls"?
This may sound weird, but it's not. Well, in fact, it is very weird indeed.
–– With equal right one might say that Romania should correctly be called Wales. ––
If that joke is lost on you, read the ...
- 237
12
votes
Why the words for pineapple sound so similar in Hebrew and in German?
Ananas is not from Hebrew. It is from a South American language, Old Tupi, from the same area where the fruit is native – the Amazon rainforest, not the Middle East. Tupi natives called the fruit ...
- 4,960
12
votes
Why do so many loan words have a different pronunciations of letters like X and Q (among others)?
In the end, nobody gets to decide except the people who do the writing! When a lot of people start doing something the same way, it eventually becomes a convention. The convention in English used to ...
- 64.1k
11
votes
Accepted
Why does IAST exist when IPA is there?
IPA and IAST serve different purposes, as their respective names already suggest. IPA is an alphabet for phonetic rendering of speech (in the broad sense). To use it on Sanskrit we would have to agree ...
- 1,030
10
votes
Accepted
Using Polish-inspired z Digraphs for Czech, Slovak
No, it is not acceptable and it is never done. It used to be done before the changes that appeared gradually in the 15th century, inspired by a paper most likely written by Jan Hus around 1400.
Before ...
- 1,293
9
votes
Why is it that Babylonian king names do not match their Akkadian equivalent?
This comes down to the ambiguities in the Cuneiform script.
Cuneiform doesn't have a one-to-one correspondence between signs and sounds. The sign DIŊIR is a good example. The sign started out in ...
- 64.1k
9
votes
Accepted
How do we know for sure a transliteration is lossless?
A transliteration system is usually either designed to be lossless, or not. To know whether it is or not, you have to know the target language.
Lossless transliteration systems generally have to use ...
- 64.1k
8
votes
Accepted
Why is there no standard romanization scheme for Arabic?
The problem isn't no standard—the problem is too many standards!
There are at least a dozen competing systems for romanization of Arabic, all mutually incompatible, all used for different purposes. ...
- 64.1k
8
votes
Why the words for pineapple sound so similar in Hebrew and in German?
Melissa and user6726 addressed the word Ananas quite nicely. But to respond to this part of your question:
Since Hebrew should be older than German as it was spoken Adam and Eve and there should be ...
- 64.1k
7
votes
Accepted
How are cuneiform glyphs numbered?
In theory, the signs with the lowest index numbers are the most frequent. In practice, the numbers were assigned when the pronunciation of signs were first identified. For example, after u1, u2, u3 ...
- 23.8k
7
votes
What is the point of transliteration that needs transliteration? Specifically, Mesoamerican languages
For some of these languages, it's not transliteration, it's just how the language is written! Very few Mesoamerican languages were ever written in anything except the Latin alphabet, and nowadays it's ...
- 64.1k
7
votes
What is the point of transliteration that needs transliteration? Specifically, Mesoamerican languages
Transliteration is converting letters of one alphabet to those of another: you can transliterate Latin into Arabic, Arabic into Ge'ez, Ge'ez into Devanagari and Devanagari into Cyrillic. You don't ...
- 82.2k
7
votes
What is Ś in Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform?
ś is the conventional transliteration for Hebrew שׂ ( śīn ), and is used also for its Semitic source, now more usually transcribed as s₂. It is believed that Old Akkadian (at least) still retained ...
- 23.8k
6
votes
Why is "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani" transliterated with a Chi in Matthew and Mark?
Like everything in the Bible, this is the subject of an enormous mass of scholarly and non-scholarly literature. The question at issue here is whether Jesus is supposed to be speaking Hebrew or ...
- 23.8k
6
votes
Verifying these resources are accurate written representations for each language using Latin script
Xhosa, Zulu, Swahili, Yoruba, Kele, and the vast majority of other Bantu (and Niger-Congo) languages are written in the Latin script. The ones in the south that have clicks tend to use the "spare" ...
- 64.1k
6
votes
Are there any existing guidelines for romanizing Aynu Itak?
The de facto standard method for transcribing Ainu (both in Latin alphabet and in katakana) being used today is the one proposed in Akor Itak, a textbook published by the Hokkaido Utari Association (...
- 61
6
votes
How to transliterate the following Arabic letters in English
There are several transcription systems from Arabic into Latin letters. Wikipedia provides a comparison table of several transcription systems in one place. You need to decide yourself which system ...
- 1,773
6
votes
Accepted
When transliterating English words to Korean, why does the first F become a ㅎ?
Korean has no /f/ sound (unvoiced labiodental fricative), so it has to approximate it with a sound it does have. There are two possibilities.
ㅍ is a labial plosive that is heavily aspirated. The ...
- 1,485
6
votes
Accepted
What is the purpose of transliteration?
The words "transliteration" and "transcription" are often used interchangeably. If you want to draw a distinction between them, the distinction is usually that "transliteration" tries to encode the ...
- 64.1k
6
votes
Accepted
Is Hebrew a language which can be transliterated programmatically according to a small set of clear rules?
First we have to decide which Hebrew we're talking about. Biblical Hebrew can certainly be transliterated programmatically, since Medieval scribes augmented the writing system to include ...
- 2,392
6
votes
Accepted
How do you decode the CELT transcriptions?
Most of these aren’t CELT-specific, but commonly used in manuscript editions everywhere.
MS is a common English abbreviation for manuscript.
The Latin is part of the manuscript. A very large ...
- 3,971
5
votes
What languages are the most similar to English?
I am myself a native speaker of Bengali. I also learned English at a very young age. I am really surprised at your comment,
"Since I was a small child in a bilingual home I've been struck by how, ...
- 59
5
votes
When transliterating English words to Korean, why does the first F become a ㅎ?
Kang, Kenstowicz & Ito observe that treatment of [f] is a bit more variable. They say that direct loans from English have [pʰ] ([pʰodɨ] "Ford"), but ultimately English-based loans can also come ...
- 82.2k
5
votes
Accepted
How to transliterate/transcribe/romanize Ancient Egyptian
(Foreword: if you want to be pedantic, this will be a transcription or a bound transcription, representing the phonemes as best we can, but not necessarily representing the orthography.)
The list you'...
- 64.1k
5
votes
What is the purpose of transliteration?
One can actually read a transliterated text. Hardly possible with a sequence of Unicode numeric codes. If you want the most exact replication of the text, then even Unicode might not be "best" (your ...
- 1,293
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