Hallo conlangers!

On Saturday 19 January 2013 14:44:30 Melroch wrote:

> Given that both romanizations are transliterstions of a (supposed) native
> script I really see no problem. You won't e.g.  generally se the same
> transliteration/transcription of Cyrillic, Devanagari, Japanese or other
> scripts on a general map or in a newspaper as in a philological article.

Sure.  For Russian, for instance, there is a scholarly
transliteration that maps Cyrillic letters on Latin letters,
often with diacritics, loosely according to the conventions
used for languages such as Czech or Croatian.  But in German
newspapers, one rather find spellings such as _Gorbatschow_
which simply attempt to apply German spelling conventions to
Russian names.  This has many shortcomings.  You never know
whether _s_ represents /s/ or /z/, or whether _sch_ represents
/ʃ/ or /ʒ/!  (Also, it has a *heptagraph*: _schtsch_ for what
is a single phoneme in names such as _Chruschtschow_!)

> The uniform use of Pinyin to transcribe Mandarin is both recent and
> exceptional.

Other transcriptions such as Wade-Giles are not dead yet in
Germany (the capital of China is still spelled _Peking_ in
German newspapers), but Pinyin is indeed advancing.

> In particular you may take an analogy from the way different
> transcriptions of Japanese strive to represent either Japanese phonology,
> kana spelling or the pronunciation in the terms of the conventions of
> (usually) English, or some compromise between these according to the whim
> of the scheme designer.

I think Hepburn is about as well established for Japanese
as Pinyin is for Chinese.  One rarely sees things such as
_Mitubisi_ (a purely phonemic transcription) or _Mizubischi_
(a German-wise spelling) for _Mitsubishi_ (Hepburn).

>       In practice the choice of scheme or convention is
> mostly guided by the intended or expected audience of the publication -- in
> particular how much their bias is linguistic or not, or how desirable or
> critical lossless retranscription/retransliteration is. We all know that a
> cartographer will generally fall at or near the 'in terms of English/target
> audience's language conventions' end of the spectrum.

Yep.

> In fact there does seem to exist a fairly widespread comvention which can
> be summarized as "consonants according to or based on English conventions
> and vowels based on Italian/Spanish/German conventions" -- an effect of
> awareness that English vowel spelling conventions are very out of the
> mainstream for the Latin alphabet as well as internally ambiguous.

Right.  It is the usual rule in much of the mass media,
including fantasy and science fiction.

>       It is
> interesting to see that this 'AngloRomance' convention is widely adhered to
> even by Swedish writers targetting a Swedish audience. And even where you
> will see Swedish-based conventions for consonants like <tj sj zj> (mainly
> Cyrillic) you won't see Swedish-like <å o> but Italian-like <o u>. And the
> sibilants will be <zj tj sj sjtj> not <zj tsj sj tj> which would better
> reflect the fact that Swedish <tj> is [ɕ] for most speakers, not to speak
> of the fact that Swedish lacks [z ʒ] and <sj> is [x] or [χ] for most
> speakers.  The same goes for Ancient Greek: you may see <Atena> rather than
> <Athena> but you won't see <Athäna> and you may see <Akilles> but never
> <Såkratäs>!

In German, what you call the Anglo-Romance convention gradually
gains territory from the ad-hoc German-based conventions that
have been in use traditionally, but not for some of those
languages that are featured in the news often, such as Russian
or Chinese.

But it would indeed be nice if all countries using the Latin
alphabet would agree ;)
 
> My own shifts in conventions for transcribing Sohlob. I started out over 15
> years ago with an ASCII-based system using <tj sj dj zj> for alveopalatals.
> This was actually sub-phonemic since I decided very early that [ʑ] was an
> allophone of /dʑ/, and <j> was used only in those digraphs.

Sensible!

>        At the same
> time I used <ny hl hr> for single phonemes and <ng> ambiguously for /ŋ/ and
> /ŋg/,

I know that ambiguity too well ;)

>        justified by the conventions in the 'native' script which was and is
> under-specifying to a high degree. There were also the slightly odd <e> for
> /ɨ/ <ae> for /æ/ which was unambiguous because of vowel harmony.

Back when computers had difficulties with anything else than
ASCII (or whatever the relevant brand used, such as "PETSCII"),
I used a "universal transcription system" of *all* of my
conlangs that used only the 26 letters of the basic Latin
alphabet (actually, just 23: _c_, _q_ and _x_ weren't used,
though I sometimes used _x_ for /ks/ and _xh_ for /kʃ/)
with many digraphs but no diacritics.  I have documented it
on FrathWiki:

http://www.frathwiki.com/Universal_Transcription_System_%28WeepingElf%29

Of course, I really knew close to naught about phonology when
I came up with this.  One early version even had _r_ for /ɣ/,
reflecting an idiosyncrasy of my idiolect of German!

I no longer use it as it is, but I still find it moderately
useful as a starting point for the development of custom-built
romanizations.

For Old Albic, I use a romanization system which is mainly
based on Insular Celtic and Tolkienian Elvish spelling
conventions (chiefly, _c_ for /k/); I consistently use
h-digraphs for non-sibilant fricatives, and _ng_ for /ŋ/.

I have repeatedly considered chaging this into one that
uses _k_ for /k/, _f_ for /ɸ/, _z_ for /θ/ and _x_ for
/x/ (could not find something fitting for /ŋ/, though),
but that would mean changing thousands of occurences of the
spellings now used in the grammar, the dictionary and the
text samples!  Also, I find that the current system *works
well* (there is also no ambiguity problem with the h-digraphs:
where a /h/ follows a voiceless stop, both sounds merge into
a fricative), so there is no need to change it.

The orthography of Roman Germanech is an unholy mixture of
German and Romance spelling conventions, reflecting the nature
of the language, but it works well, and I think it is something
a 19th-century clergyman or schoolmaster could have come up
with.

>        I later
> switched to a Latin-1 based convention with <æ c ç j j> instead of <ae tj
> sj dj zj> and this in spite of the fact that /tɕ dʑ/ were digraphs in the
> native script! When Unicode entered the scene I did introduce <ŋ> instead
> of <ñ> in the transcription of the (then) protolanguage Kijeb, and I did
> consider introducing <ñ ŋ ł> instead of <ny ng hl> in Classical Sohlob but
> decided against it because it wasn't clear what I would replace <hr hm hn
> hny hng> with in the sister language Cidilib.

I used _ñ_ for /ŋ/ for a while in my notes on what was to
become Old Albic (as Tolkien did in some of his legacy papers),
but found that this was misleading - _ñ_ is for /ɲ/ and nothing
else!

>       More recently when writing
> *in Swedish* about the Sohldar universe for a non-conlanger audience I've
> considered following AngloRomance conventions and use <ch sh j zh kh gh>
> rather than <c ç j j x q> -- being mostly concerned about the Cidilib
> placename Jdrig/Zhdrig The problem is that most Swedes would even pronounce
> <j> as [j] when speaking English!

This problem is less prominent in Germany; rather, one sometimes
finds hypercorrect pronunciations of English _v_ as /w/ and _y_
as /dʒ/!

>       OTOH the 'SuedoCyrillic' <tj sj dj zj ch
> gh> might look silly to the audience (AngloRomance rather than Swedish
> expectations in a Swedish audience!) and moreover <sj ch> might be
> misleading. I got so despondent that I considered going for a straight
> transliteration of the native spellings using <ty sy zy zy x q> in Cidilib
> and <tx sx dz zz x q> in CS!

Seems to make sense to me.

>       Should I even go so far as to use <ă> or <ȧ>
> for /ʁ/ and CS <bb dd gg> for /p t k/ and Cidilib <hb hd dy hg> for /p t tɕ
> k/?

That would be weird.

> Then why not <hh> for /s/ as is actually the case in the native script?

Bizarre!

> I think that would introduce bogus alienness were none actually exists and
> make the two conlangs seem more different than they are or would be to
> illiterate native speakers.

Amen.

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