AsianDOC Electronic Newsletter 1:1(March 1998)
by John Clews
I am the chair of the International Organization for Standardization subcommittee responsible for transliteration (ISO/TC46/SC2: Conversion of Written Languages). This met from 12-14 May 1997 at the British Standards Institution in Chiswick, London, to review international standards in this area - both already published and under development, and next meets in Athens during the period May 11-15 1998.
I am interested in any participation that you or any of your colleagues may be able to undertake, either in meetings or electronically, given your own necessary involvment in the multilingual use of computers.
Despite computing standards like ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode, there will always be a need for transliteration as long as people do not have the same level of competence in all scripts besides the script used in their mother-tongue, and may have a need to deal with these languages, or when they have to deal with mechanical or computerised equipment which does not provide all the scripts of characters that they need.
The secretary (Evangelos Melagrakis from Greece) and I intend to make transliteration and ISO/TC46/SC2 far more visible and far more relevant to end users than it has been in the past. To enable this, an electronic mailing list for ISO/TC46/SC2 (tc46sc2@elot.gr) and an associated Web site (located at http://www.elot.gr/tc46sc2) has now been set up by ELOT (the Greek national standards body). We hope this list will attract researchers and scientists who can add useful information which might assist in developing standards on the Conversion of Written Languages.
Scope of transliteration work in ISO/TC46/SC2's working groups.
[WG1:] Transliteration of Cyrillic (work now combined with that of WG5)
[WG2:] Transliteration of Arabic (work now combined with that of WG11)
WG3: Transliteration of Hebrew
WG4: Transliteration of Korean
WG5: Transliteration of Greek, Armenian, Georgian and Cyrillic
WG6: Transliteration of Chinese
WG7: Transliteration of Japanese
WG8: Transliteration and computers
WG9: Transliteration of Thai
WG10: Transliteration of Mongolian
WG11: Transliteration of Perso-Arabic script
WG12: Transliteration of Indic scripts
SCRIPTS USED IN OFFICIAL LANGUAGES WORLDWIDE, AND SOME COMMON ORIGINS
NB: if necessary, to avoid distortion, resize your viewer/printer if the word "ORIGINS" in the above line is not at the end of a single line, and view or print with a fixed pitch font (Courier at 12 point or smaller is suggested).
Latin Cyrillic Devanagari - - - Tibetan / \ \Gujarati / \- Armenian \ Bengali _ Mongolian / \ \ Gurumukhi \ Greek - Georgian SOGDIAN | \ SCRIPT \ | \ Telugu \ PHOENICIAN BRAHMI - - Kannada SINITIC - Japanese / SCRIPT \ SCRIPT Malayalam SCRIPT \ / | \ \ Tamil \ Hebrew |Arabic \ Korean | \ \ - - Sinhala> | \ \ | \ \ _ Burmese | \ Khmer | \ \ Ethiopic Divehi \ _ Thai (Ethiopia, (Maldives) Lao Eritrea)
PHOENICIAN, BRAHMI, SOGDIAN and SINITIC scripts are no longer in use as such, but all other scripts listed above (used in 99% of the world's languages) can trace their ancestry back to these. The East Asian scripts listed above have a slightly more complex link: Chinese characters (hanzi in Chinese) still use similar shapes to the Sinitic characters used around 1200 BC.
The Japanese and Korean scripts use Chinese characters (kanji in Japanese, hanja in Korean) together with their own phonetic script (kana in Japanese, hangul in Korean). Korean now often uses only hangul without using hanja.
Scripts not used at state level, and other historical scripts, are not shown above, except for the four scripts listed in capitals above, from which most other scripts are derived.
The tc46sc2@elot.gr list on transliteration
There are quite a few with an interest in transliteration in library catalogues on the list, but there are other potential users of transliteration too.
One major advantage of email is the ability to involve far more people in the development of a common purpose than were involved before, to get user feedback, and expert opinion from various sources. There are now over 270 subscribers to tc46sc2@elot.gr, from 43 countries and territories, providing a global interest group in this area, covering all the scripts shown above.
Subscribing to the mailing list for ISO/TC46/SC2
In order to join the list, send an email to
majordomo@elot.gr
with this message in the body of the text:
subscribe tc46sc2 your@email.address
(but with your real email address replacing the string your@email.address).
To find out further commands you can use, send the command "help" as the text of an email either to tc46sc2-request@elot.gr or to: majordomo@elot.gr To unsubscribe, send the command "unsubscribe" instead, omitting the "quotes" marks in both cases. This will tell you how to obtain copies of past messages etc., and other useful features.
Once you are subscribed, you can send messages to tc46sc2@elot.gr and receive messages from other members of the list. Please reply where possible to the list as a whole, so that all can benefit: using the Group Reply function (pressing G on some email software) is the simplest way to achieve this.
Other members will also be interested to see who else is joining the list, so it is useful to send a brief introduction (say, one or two short paragraphs) to tc46sc2@elot.gr at the outset, saying what languages, scripts and other things you are involved in. That is the most likely way to stimulate others to write on the subjects you are interested in!
I look forward to seeing new participants on this list. Please feel free to forward this to anyone else who may be interested in transliteration standardisation issues, and to send any queries about the list to me.
Yours sincerely
John Clews and Evangelos Melagrakis
(Chair & Secretary of ISO/TC46/SC2: Conversion of Written Languages)
--
J. Clews, SESAME, 8 Avenue Road, Harrogate, HG2 7PG, England
Email: Converse@sesame.demon.co.uk; tel: +44 (0) 1423 888 432
E. Melagrakis, ELOT, 313 Acharnon Str., GR-111 45 Athens, Greece
Email: eem@elot.gr tel: +30 1 201 9890
URL http://asiandoc.lib.ohio-state.edu/v1n1/tech/Transliteration.html
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