Transliteration

Transliteration is the respresentation of words of one language within the alphabet of another language. For example the Greek language is written in the 24-letter Greek alphabet, which overlaps with, but differs from the 26-letter version of the Roman alphabet in which English is written. For example "Aristotle" is a transliteration of the name of the philosopher whose name in Greek is spelled Aριστοτηλησ. (In classical Greek of Aristotle's time, lower-case letters were not used, and the name was spelled APIΣTOTHΛHΣ.) Etymologies in English dictionaries often identify Greek words as ancestors of words used in English. Consequently, most such dictionaries transliterate the Greek words into Roman letters. Similarly, when Russians are named in newspaper articles written in English, their names are transliterated from the Cyrillic alphabet in which the Russian language is written, into our own alphabet. For example, in "Dr. Zhivago" the letters "Zh" correspond to a single Cyrillic letter. The word "transliteration" is often used interchangeably with "transcription". The former is used in modern publications while the latter was used in older publications. Properly used, the word transcription refers to the conversion of the spoken word into the written language as in the transcription of the proceedings of a court hearing. For example, Pinyin is a transliteration system for Mandarin using the Roman alphabet, and is often called a romanization. The same words are likely to be transliterated differently under different systems, for example Peking vs. Beijing. Transliteration can be done in a non-alphabetic language too. For example, in a Beijing Newspaper, president Bush's name is transliterated into two Chinese characters that sounds like "Bu4 Shu1" (布殊) by using the characters that mean cloth and weird.

Transliteration has proven to fail miserably in conveying the original pronunciation. One ancient example is the Sanskrit word Channa which transliterated into the Chinese word Ch'an through buddhist scriptures. Ch'an (禪 Zen buddhism) was transliterated from Japanese to Zen in English. Channa to Zen is quite a change.

The idea of transliteration is complicated by the genuine use in multiple languages of different common nouns for the same person, place or thing. Thus, Muhammad is in common use now in English and Mohammed is less popular, though there are excellent reasons for each transliteration. Muslim and Mohammedan are less interchangeable (are they in 2002?), but the typical French usage "Musulman" is considered offensively colonialist in English language contexts.

Another complex problem is the adoption of loan words from one language to another, followed by subsequent changes in 'preferred' transliteration. For instance, the word describing a philosophy or religion in China was popularized in English as Tao and given the termination -ism to produce an English word Taoism. That transliteration reflects the Wade-Giles system. More recent pinyin transliterations produce Dao and Daoism. (See also Daoism versus Taoism.) In a Wikipedia article about Greece, a modern transliteration says "Elliniki", where a classical one would have "Helleniki".

Many people believe that transliterations of the original language should be preferred for places, people and things over anglicised terms. For example, they might hold that what is now commonly called in English Munich should instead be called in English München, just as it in German. There is an increasing tendency in English to do exactly this, although the anglicised forms of most words are still more common, with a few notable exceptions (e.g. Beijing). Others do not approve of this trend. Transliteration is also used for simple encryption.

Explanations for this may be a desire on the part of English speakers to be 'authentic' and 'correct', the increasing usage of English by native speakers of non-English languages (who may prefer to use their native language form for a native person or place even in English), and as a reaction to the spread of the English language, which threatens non-English languages--using the native forms of such words may be viewed as a way of compensating for the use of English.

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In the study of languages written in cuneiform, transliteration refers to the process of representing the sounds of written cuneiform signs in a lossless way, as opposed to transcription, which is a lossy method of representing the spoken language. Because cuneiform is polyvalent, signs may be interpreted to represent more than one syllable (or logogram). For example, the sign DINGIR may represent either the sound "an" or "il", as well as the word meaning god and the phonetic complement for a name of a deity. Similarly, the sign "MU" represents either the sound "a" or the word meaning water.

Therefore, a text containing DINGIR and MU in succession could be construed to represent the words "ana", "ila", god + "a" (the accusative ending), god + water, or a divine name "A" or Water. Someone transcribing the signs would make the decision how the signs should be read and assemble the signs as "ana", "ila", "Ila" ('god"+accusative case), etc. A transliteration of these signs, however, would separate the signs with dashes "il-a", "an-a", "DINGIR-a". This is much easier to read than the original cuneiform, but now the reader is able to trace the sounds back to the original signs and determine if the correct decision was made on how to read them.

Since Cuneiform also exhibits polyvalence, in which more than one sign represents a given sound (look up polyphony and polyvalence!), the transliteration for a phonetic value includes a designation of which sign represents the sound. Cuneiform signs are canonically numbered, and usually a subscripted number follows each sign: "u₆" corresponds to a specific sign, whereas "u₄" corresponds to a different one, both of which are pronounced "u". Due to a historical artifact, the sign number one is unnumbered and unaccented: "u" = "u₁", number two is unnumbered with an acute accent: "ú" == "u₂", and number three is often unnumbered with a grave accent: "ù" == "u₃".