A fact fromScientific transliteration of Cyrillic appeared on Wikipedia'sMain Page in theDid you know column on 10 February 2006. The text of the entry was as follows:
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Thanks toMzajac for creating this useful page. A few points:
Would you mind if we moved the page toScientific transliteration of Cyrillic? I'm sure there are scientific transliteration schemes for other scripts too.
I'd like to question the use of "phonemic" in the introduction. In fact, this strikes me as almost a contradiction in terms: A transliteration (as opposed to transcription) system is by definition concerned with a 1-to-1 relationship betweengraphemes, notphonemes. This excludes a 1-to-1 relationship of graphemes in the target script with phonemes in the source language(s). Unless it so happens that all the source language orthographies have in turn an exact 1-to-1 relationship between their native graphemes and phonemes. Which is hardly the case inany language, and surely not inall the Cyrillic/Slavic ones? For instance, I take it that Russian <ё> and <o> really involve the same phoneme, /o/, don't they? In that case, a transliteration system that treats them differently is, by definition, not phonemic.
I'd rather keep it at the simpler title, as this is by far the most common name (although most commonly in a Slavistics context), and I've never heard of any other scientific transliterations. I suggest we leave it until another one does appear, in which case it's easy enough to move it to the disambiguating title. In principle: don't disambiguate if you don't know there's a reason to.
Perhaps the wording could be improved, but there definitely is a phonemic principle behind the scheme, and it is based on the phonemic Croatian & Serbian alphabets' correspondence. In some cases, I think the transliterated text better reflects a language's phonemics than the original Cyrillic, for example the separation ofj from mostiotified vowels (я=ja, ю=ju, є=je, ї=ji) andщ=šč, although it isn't strictly one phoneme per letter, such as in theе≠je andë≠jo examples. It also has a unique transliteration scheme respecting the phonetic characteristics of each Slavic language. This linguists' scheme contrasts sharply with ISO 9, which strictly relates to letter-forms and ignores phonemics—probably the favourite system of a file clerk.
I see several references, but that first hit is merely a description in the title of an article about the Al-Sana’ah Transliteration System (STS). There's zero mention in the articles onromanization andtransliteration.
Does anyone know if scientific transliteration for Arabic is consistent with this system, or does it belong in its own separate article?—MichaelZ. 2006-02-07 20:45 Z
I've added ISO 9:1995 to the table.—MichaelZ. 2006-02-07 21:58 Z
---google.com for [scientific translation] start with result 2---
Arabic transliteration - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaA full "scientific" transliteration, on the other hand, will make use of diacriticsthat may be unfamiliar to untrained readers. ...en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_transliteration - 45k - Cached - Similar pages
---A Guide to Hebrew TransliterationIn scientific transliteration this can be represented as either a "t" (underlined )or "th". The "Sepharadic" modern Israeli pronunciation does not use the ...www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/RelS367/transliteration.html - 11k - Cached - Similar pages
---Transliteration and pronunciation of ancient EgyptianThe following tables lists some frequently used hieroglyphs, their hieraticcounterparts, their scientific transliteration and how some people think they ...nefertiti.iwebland.com/people/transliteration.htm - 11k - Cached - Similar pages
I don't really think that we would need any. Right now it would be little more than a dicdef ("A scientific transliteration is a transliteration scheme that is generally agreed on for scientific use in a given field of study" or something to that effect.) I think no harm would be done if we just moved the article the normal way, with an automatic redirect from the present title. No prejudice against somebody later creating a new article here, with perhaps a list of "scientific" translation schemes for different scripts, if anybody sees a need for such.Lukas(T.|@)09:03, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I would use "scientific transliteration of Cyrillic". the "of" is very common in WP article titles, "Cyrillictext" is not really needed and the whole would be schemed like "Romanization of XY". redirect is fine, everybody is free to make it a dab or stub.Tobias Conradi(Talk)10:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, but moving this article and leaving a redirect here doesn't help the basic problem: when a reader like Ardric47, above, clicks the link and ends up at this article with no mention of other scientific transliterations.—MichaelZ. 2006-02-17 15:17 Z
This seems to be (largely) the same as ISO/R 9:1968, which is featured in theISO 9 article alongside ISO 9:1995. Therefore I think the articles should be merged. “Scientific transliteration” is not an unambiguous lemma at all—you should go by the standard’s name (even if it is not ISO, but e.g. GOST or ALA/LoC), assuming it is a codified norm and not a loose convention.Christoph Päper13:59, 9 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
This article is about the traditional Cyrillic "scientific transliteration", in use since the nineteenth century, and still widely seen in older books. ISO/R 9:1968 was a late-1960s standardization of it, with a few differences, and is still used in Slavistics publications. ISO 9:1995 is a major revision, with a single table for all languages—since it effectively ignores the different languages' phonetics, I think it is more widely used by administrators of international organizations' than by linguists.
There is a large grey area between the two, but they are different, and used by different people and organizations. If anything, ISO/R 9:1968 may belong in this article at least as much as it does in the other.
If someone is to write a separate article about "scientific transliteration" for any other writing systems, then this one could be moved toScientific transliteration of Cyrillic, but the subject of this article predates the ISO 9 codification by seventy years.—MichaelZ. 2006-05-09 22:08 Z
I know about the differences quite well,now! As a matter of fact almost every member of any field that needs/uses conversion of Cyrillic into Latin letters seems to think of his system as the only or at least the “correctest” one. Slavists, geographers, immigration offices, sports federations etc. pp. often simply refer tothe transliteration (or transcription) without mentioning the standard or some unambiguous name. Wikipedia doesn’t help novices by scattering the information over a number of articles (and even namespaces). After all the differences between standards, establishing an evolutionary chain, are small, at least for the common letters of Russian and elsewhere they lie mostly in the selection of diacritical marks or in increased language independence. (Transcriptions which are dependent on target and source language differ in more aspects and should therefore probably be dealt with separately.) —Christoph Päper00:10, 29 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
There are also collective articles onRomanization of Russian,Romanization of Ukrainian, etc., which summarize and compare the different systems. The point is that ISO 9 and Scientific Transliteration are used by different people in different fields.—MichaelZ. 2006-05-31 14:51 Z
let me chime in and support a move toScientific transliteration (Cyrillic) at least: there are other cases where scientific transliteration contrasts with loose or common transliteration systems, for example in the case of the Arabic alphabet. The title as it is, this not being a specifically Slavic work of reference, is too misleading.dab(ᛏ)15:19, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
