Emily Feng writes for NPR about a Taiwanese woman who sings in her indigenous language:
At 41, Abao — her full name is Aljenljeng Tjaluvie — is one of Taiwan’s most beloved music stars. Her chart-topping tunes have swept the island’s top music accolades. And she’s done it all by singing in the Indigenous Paiwan language — not Chinese, which dominates Taiwan’s competitive music industry.
“When people think of Indigenous music, they think of some elder pounding a drum. That’s important too, but young Indigenous people have their own way of living and their own community and they want to be able to mix their culture with what they like,” she says.
The Paiwan people are one of 16 officially recognized Indigenous tribes in Taiwan, and the second-largest. Taiwan’s President Tsai Yingwen is one-quarter Paiwan.
Taiwan has long had an outsized musical influence on the Mandarin Chinese-speaking world. Despite the island’s small population (just over 23 million as of this year), it has generated abundant talent who, for decades, have graced music charts from mainland China to Hong Kong. Especially popular are Taiwan’s Mandopop hits — Mandarin Chinese power ballads and disco-inspired dance songs from singers like Teresa Teng, whose saccharine love songs are now classics in China.
Artists like Abao are at the forefront of a whole new generation of Taiwanese musicians who do not sing in Mandarin Chinese, but rather their own Austronesian languages, native to Taiwan. Their popularity reflects changing tastes in Taiwan, away from an exclusively Chinese-centered pop culture toward one that is uniquely Taiwanese. The shift has been further fueled by an overdue recognition of Indigenous culture and language in Taiwan, and a growing mainstream awareness of the island’s Austronesian roots.
There’s a useful brief history (“Just under 2.5% of Taiwanese are Indigenous — part of the original Austronesian people who lived on the island for thousands of year before Chinese settlers, Dutch traders and Japanese armies came and went”), and then we get the singer’s personal history:
For years, her father drove a taxi for a living, and Abao would sit in the front seat with him and listen in on him and his passengers as they made small talk in the various Chinese languages spoken in Taiwan. “His taxi also had a radio and I would listen to all sorts of music — music sung in Taiwanese, in the Hakka language, and Western music.” ABBA was one of the groups she recalls hearing.
Shadowing her father also allowed her to attain fluency in Taiwanese, a variation of the Chinese language spoken widely on the island, in addition to Mandarin Chinese. “My father was the first person who pushed me to learn Taiwanese,” she says. “He feared we would be bullied and we wouldn’t even understand.” On the weekends, she made frequent trips back to the Paiwan community to see the rest of her family.
Writing songs in the Paiwan language has let her rediscover and relearn her mother tongue. Much of her songwriting process for her last two albums began with recording long conversations with her mother, who died last year. “People say my lyrics are like poems, but my mother and I would just chat and chat and suddenly get to a phrase and think, wow that sentence is so funny! And that would become a lyric,” she says, laughing. That writing process was one of the inspirations behind one of Abao’s biggest hits, called “Mother Tongue” or “Kinakaian” in Paiwan […]
Music, Abao believes, is the most accessible way to connect people in Taiwan — “to slowly reduce the concept of what the ‘other’ must be like,” as she puts it. And she has become so popular that when she gives a concert, her fans — no matter their age or ethnicity or mother tongue — now sing the Paiwan lyrics right back at her.
Now, that’s a good way to keep a language from falling into desuetude. (Paiwan is interesting, by the way: “Unlike many other Formosan languages that have merged many Proto-Austronesian phonemes, Paiwan preserves most Proto-Austronesian phonemes and is thus highly important for reconstruction purposes.”) Good for her, and a happy new year to all Hatters!
Thank you Hat, and a Happy New Year to you.
Taiwan has long had an outsized musical influence on the Mandarin Chinese-speaking world.
Indeed, many Taiwan Artistes have made it big in the Mainland. The PRC is now compelling them to declare themselves Chinese not Taiwanese, or find their career terminated.
In the linked video, is Abao using official sign language? Her hand movements seem too deliberate and stylised to be merely impressionistic. Ah yes sign language godmother.
(Despite my frequent visits to Taiwan, I’m afraid I can be no help as to Abao’s presence or influence. I’m of the mindset ‘all pop music sounds the same’ — especially all MandoPop. The piece mentions Abba who are precisely the reason I abandoned my small foray out of the Western Classical tradition. This presumably is supposed to be ‘gospel influence’. Hmm. Yes the early Portuguese/Dutch colonisers were particularly effective in bringing Christianity to the indigenous population — there were no Sinitic settlers at the time.)
There’s another Taiwanese band (of a slightly more hard rock/metal genre), Collage 珂拉琪, that sings some songs in Amis. Always fun to hear an epiglottal fricative in music (perhaps more popularly found in Somali music?). The singer’s grandmother was Amis – I am not sure if she considers herself one.
Three old posts on Austronesian and Taiwan:
Austronesian linguistic phylogeny (2009)
Austronesian and Taiwan (2014)
More on the spread of the Austronesian languages (2016)
I remembered that one of the indigenous languages on the eastern coast of Taiwan could be the result of a back-migration from the Philippines, but I couldn’t recall which one. I found it in the Blench paper discussed in the 2014 post, and it’s the Amis.
This is an incidental point, but President Tsai, in Latin-script contexts, consistently spells her own name as Tsai Ing-wen. Why is NPR calling her Tsai Yingwen? Stylebook tyranny?
“This is an incidental point, but President Tsai, in Latin-script contexts, consistently spells her own name as Tsai Ing-wen. Why is NPR calling her Tsai Yingwen? Stylebook tyranny?”
Could it be just unintentional, a mistake? I don’t know what stylebook rules for them would give a suggestion to spell someone’s name other than how the bearer of the name wants it spelled.
They did put out stuff about catching mistakes before publication and how it’s easy to let something slip.
https://www.npr.org/sections/memmos/2018/07/26/632622246/think-you-know-how-to-spell-that-famous-persons-name-don-t-trust-your-memory
And given what I perceive NPR’s general feel is about respect for spelling people’s names how they want it to be (e.g. how important it is for a person’s identity to get their name right as they want it), I would actually be kind of surprised if they didn’t follow through in this way. Has the Taiwanese leader herself been known to use that spelling in other contexts or situations?
https://training.npr.org/2019/04/09/5-techniques-to-spell-any-name-correctly-every-time/
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/02/989609197/what-listeners-told-us-about-the-importance-of-getting-names-right
https://www.npr.org/2015/07/09/421350056/spell-my-name
“Shadowing her father also allowed her to attain fluency in Taiwanese, a variation of the Chinese language spoken widely on the island, in addition to Mandarin Chinese.”
I also noticed this phrase “variation of the Chinese language”. They didn’t go there with the whole dialect with an army navy/trope or explain more clearly what Taiwanese is here (I’m guessing it would be consistent with say “Taiwanese Mandarin” vs. standard Mandarin on the mainland, but what’s meant here is Taiwanese as Hokkien right?).
what’s meant here is Taiwanese as Hokkien right?
That’s certainly how I took it, and that’s what everyone I knew called the language when I was living in Taiwan.
SH: one can imagine a stylebook rule to “use one romanization system consistently in transliterating Chinese names,” although that would be kind of a dumb rule since it is reasonably well-known that Sinitically-named people who have occasion to write out their names in Latin script do not, in fact, all adhere to a single romanization system when doing so, and there may be emotional/political baggage connected with a particular individual having used a particular romanization and not used various potential alternatives. “Use one romanization system by default absent contrary information about the specific preferences of the specific individual” is easier to defend, but Pres. Tsai is not a low-profile person. Her office routinely puts out official press releases in English, for example. https://english.president.gov.tw/NEWS/6420
I see that all the Austronesian languages on Taiwan have opted for Romanized orthographies, some Paiwan consonants being especially challenging to distinguish. I bet there are records of Japanese colonial renderings in katakana.
@ J.W. Brewer
“one can imagine a stylebook rule to “use one romanization system consistently in transliterating Chinese names,”
… “Use one romanization system by default absent contrary information about the specific preferences of the specific individual” is easier to defend,…Her office routinely puts out official press releases in English,
That’s the thing that’s confusing. The “absent contrary information” would be doing quite a lot of heavy lifting assumption-wise then. I understand transliterating someone’s name who doesn’t have a pre-existing romanized/Latinized/Anglicized form and thus it’s for outsiders to decide on a convention, but once someone has a long history of their name existing in English text and how they want it like you said (e.g. as shown with press releases), I think it doesn’t make sense to change it out of desire for making it systematic (e.g. with comparison with particular other people’s romanized Chinese names).
I think at that point, it becomes, “they already had an English name, that they use/chose” not “they don’t have an English name, we must transcribe one from the origin language” conceptually to me.
I googled “Tsai Yingwen” and while this romanization or spelling appears, it seems to appear in far less contexts than “Tsai Ing-wen”. So I don’t know the history there.
The reason this was odd for me to notice was that NPR has done many pieces (e.g. typically within the context of folks of various ethnic origins or immigrants within the US) about the importance of people respecting their own chosen, personal pronounciation/spelling they’ve already used or prefered etc. regardless of it is standard for people of their ethnic/linguistic background.
For example, not a spelling-related example but pronounciation: famous NPR journalist Lakshmi Singh has gotten comments apparently by people who ask why she doesn’t pronounce her first name the traditional South Asian way but she has said according to her wiki “She prefers to follow the way her paternal Indo-Trinidadian grandmother said her name.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakshmi_Singh
So here’s a case of clearly the norm, in spoken word, not text of “it doesn’t matter what’s traditional/standard, go with individual preference”, for NPR.
I would think it easier just to Google or look up I mean (of course in a more professional way) someone’s name in English who is famous enough to have articles written about/by them than worry about checking one’s origin language which also must be looked up and then re-transcribing it directly from the origin language. It may seem simple if you only have to pick one language one rule and you know said standardized rules (e.g. transcribe/spell all Chinese-origin names one way) but then imagine doing this for all folks or public figures across many languages (e.g. let’s do one for Chinese, do one for Arabic, one for Russian etc.). Pretty soon you’d need stylebooks for tons of languages (and then a judgement for when to use that style — e.g. are you going to “correct” someone in diaspora whose orthography has diverged from the standard?). To me that would be harder not simpler when they’ve probably done their own work for you in telling how their names are in English.
Especially when most public figures famous enough have a long enough history of using their own preferred orthography that individual journalists at NPR are unlikely to be the first source to have to found out about.
English is such a global language that by the time many news outlets have found out about them, any given famous person has probably already a standard way that they spell their name in English that you probably don’t need to re-invent using transcription rules from their non-English language. Are there many examples of famous people who haven’t used their names in Latin script (e.g. the person doesn’t write in English or writes in English then in the middle of a string of English text appears the person’s name in non-Latin script) and journalists are the first to decide on one?
I can imagine if you’re interviewing some random stranger in a foreign language who has never written their name down in English. E.g. “I went to country X and talked to farmer (name transcribed in English) and asked him blah blah about the drought this year”. but yeah not likely for famous figures.
@SH, perhaps the most parsimonious explanation is that NPR blundered here through sheer incompetence on the part of some individual writer/editor and does not have a sufficiently robust copy-editing function to avoid such errors?
Check out this sentence: “If Mr. Sun Yat-sen were still alive, he would tell Tsai Ing-wen to her face that she has betrayed the ancestors.” Even the Communist-bandit occupiers of the mainland go along with her preferred spelling in their vituperative official press releases!
https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/zxxx_662805/202208/t20220806_10736474.html
perhaps the most parsimonious explanation is that NPR blundered here through sheer incompetence on the part of some individual writer/editor and does not have a sufficiently robust copy-editing function to avoid such errors?
That’s my take on it.
“English is such a global language that…” – many Russians simply use the transliteration from their travel passports. The organisation that issues them once in a while changes the rules. Presently it’s the rules of ICAO.
Though… I am not quite right. This transliteration differs from what is intuitive for us:( Particularly, we usually write ю as ‘yu”, not “iu”, we would never transliterate ъ as “ie” (fortunately it does not occur in names) and I don’t see ь (which occurs in names often) in the table at all:)
@drasvi: I’m pretty sure that the Taiwanese government lets you pick how you want your Latin-scripted name in your passport and as long as it bears enough resemblance to the (or a!) pronunciation of the Chinese-character version of your name that you don’t appear to be trying to pull off a fraud, it’s fine. I don’t know if they have a default they will use if you don’t bother to fill out the appropriate part of the form. By contrast, in Russia I take it that you write out your name in Cyrillic on the passport application form and then the approved algorithm auto-romanizes it according to its own algorithmic rules?
I have two brothers-in-law who are dual ROC/US citizens, and the Latin-script spellings of their names clearly do not even reflect a consistent-within-family romanization system. That sort of thing is, as I understand it, reasonably common in Taiwan and may historically also have been common in Hong Kong and Singapore. Bureaucrats who think everything would be tidier with a uniform system are pushing against strong local cultural norms favoring individual whim and/or chaos.
“Bureaucrats who think everything would be tidier with a uniform system are pushing against strong local cultural norms favoring individual whim and/or chaos.”
Getting some strong “Ellis Island forced our family to have names changed” vibes. But actually I wonder if even more than in the past, pressure for bureaucratic homogeneity is promoted (since we have databases, computers, ability to record and standardize, e.g. automate romanization or transcription, more than back in the day when people were more free to spell their name on a whim) but at the same time a counterargument could be made that currently modern perspectives go against homogeneity, perhaps backlash against 19th and 20th century forced homogenization (e.g. with individualist, more American-style “call people what they want to be called” being more common now even in previously more collectivist societies).
“Ellis Island forced our family to have names changed” vibes
which is a well and thoroughly debunked myth.
but an interesting one, that does the very u.s. thing of using a place as shorthand for an event – especially a violent or traumatic one (“scottsboro”, “watts”, “peekskill”, “loma prieta”, etc.) – as a way of referring to the entire dehumanizing process of immigration, from government inspections (health, political, economic) that could separate families to employment & housing discrimination to denigration of languages & cultures in public schools, the press, and entertainment. the post-renovation marketing campaign around ellis island has been very specifically aimed at uprooting its actual place in u.s. communities’ historical memory, which is/was unequivocally negative. ellis is the place where they could deny you entry; the place they could quarantine you; the place they’d deport you through on a whim. in my upbringing decades after it closed, in the 3rd u.s.-born yiddish jewish generation, “ellis island” had practically the same emotional tone as “the camps”.
That’s at the very least a common Western thing.
@SH: I have a theory, or maybe I’d better call it merely a hunch, that in Taiwan in particular, esp in the KMT-authoritarian days, the worldview of the authorities was that the REAL version of someone’s name was that given in Chinese characters, and Latin transliteration didn’t particularly need to be sensible or uniform because come on it wasn’t the real thing anyway. By the time their young IT-department types started telling them that their fancy new computer databases were under the impression that the Latin-script versions of things in practice might as well be what was real, it was hard to change attitudes.
My own (Hithersay) forebears managed to seriously misspell their own name with no pressure from officialdom at all. Mispronounce it, too. All our own work. Subliteracy is Powerful!
“the very u.s. thing of using a place as shorthand for an event – especially a violent or traumatic one
That’s at the very least a common Western thing.”
Crossing the Rubicon… Meeting one’s Waterloo.
I guess, given the prevalence of premodern warfare, battlefields also often lend themselves to this kind of thing, and presumably it’s easy to get a memorable place associated with a battle.
Is it mainly a Western thing? I suppose I could image it’s easy to invent metonymy from “place” to “memorable event associated with place” and “something related to such a memorable event” and since negative memories stick often more strongly than neutral or positive ones (or I guess, collective negative experiences might be common in shared places), it might stick. In principle, I don’t see why it has to only be US (or western) but I don’t know if anyone has looked into it.
Maybe there’s also some also positive associations or events with placenames in this way, but I can’t think of any off the top of my head. I guess religion maybe can be a source for this … e.g. Zion, a promised land etc.? But it’s not quite the same, and maybe not so specific?
@ J.W. Brewer
Oh, interesting thought. That “only the original script is real”, any transliteration into a different script isn’t “real” is reminiscent of attitudes about how sacred or religious texts must be written in their original to be “real” and that a translated or transcribed version is not. But this attitude, I guess in the Chinese case, can exist completely in a secular context for sure with ideas of “authenticity”.
You still get some vibes, maybe not script alone but attitudes like for example an immigrant, particular ethnic-origin American’s Anglicized name is not as “real” as their un-Anglicized original. But given enough time, this won’t always be the case (like with anything, over time a non-standard or “incorrectly” locally adapted version can become the next cherished tradition and “that’s now the real one”. Like how Italian Americans would react if Italians from Italy tried to correct their version or say the response one might expect if recent mainland Chinese immigrants tried to correct people with old school diaspora surnames of non-Mandarin origin, be it from San Francisco to Singapore as “less Chinese”).
” in Taiwan in particular, esp in the KMT-authoritarian days, the worldview of the authorities was that the REAL version of someone’s name was that given in Chinese characters”
(…unlike the worldview of most people here who have very strong views regarding Proper representation of their names by means of Chinese, Arabic and Cyrillic characters anbd in Devanagari…)
Guess it’s also different going from someone already literate having a name in one script who wants to match and represent their name (in what their mind perceives as “correct”) to a second script vs. someone who is subliterate or not illiterate in the old country and then when moving to a new one, it’s actually the new one doing the standardization.
On that note, just a question out of curiosity, did most (or if not, how close to most/all) Chinese immigrants to the west already have literacy in Chinese characters and if not…were ever any illiterate/subliterate members of the Chinese diaspora, to the west or otherwise, whose first exposure to standardized naming actually Latin script? Like it would be odd now thinking about it from a cultural perspective but interesting if someone Chinese first had their name first written in a Latin script in the west before they were ever able to write in Chinese characters (or even had any Chinese characters for their name at all) … could this ever have existed historically if Chinese immigrants were illiterate.
Or for that matter any other other examples of some subliterate/illiterate speaker of a language usually written in non-Latin script who moved to the west and had gained literacy in a western language written in Latin script (e.g. an illiterate Arabic speaker who never learned to write Arabic but then moved to the west, and first learned to write their name in Latin characters). If that is the case, then it would be interesting whether we could say their romanized name was actually more real than their other script’s version. Not sure, but it would depend on the literacy of the immigrant group in question right — was it usually well educated who moved?
Not quite the same but a hypothetical similar but later case would be a generations-removed from China, assimilated Anglophone-only person who’s no longer able to speak any Chinese language, taking up a Chinese name and then choosing characters for him/herself to represent it to “reconnect” with their roots (in the way that people with no Chinese ancestry often pick a Chinese name for themselves in China). In such a scenario, the Latin script could be the “original” and the Chinese one the transcription, in a reversal of arguments about authenticity.
I don’t know what drasvi’s on about. *I* only have strong views about how my name should be rendered in katakana and in tengwar …
(…unlike the worldview of most people here who have very strong views regarding Proper representation of their names by means of Chinese, Arabic and Cyrillic characters anbd in Devanagari…)
Not sure what you mean by “here” — Russia? Certainly the vast majority of Americans don’t give a damn; it barely occurs to them that there are other writing systems (except Chinese characters, which make cool tattoos).
Like it would be odd now thinking about it from a cultural perspective but interesting if someone Chinese first had their name first written in a Latin script in the west before they were ever able to write in Chinese characters (or even had any Chinese characters for their name at all) … could this ever have existed historically if Chinese immigrants were illiterate.
There’s the infamous case of Ah Q, who is (supposedly) referred to with a Latin-script name because he was too illiterate to choose what Chinese character corresponded to it. I imagine it wouldn’t have been all that uncommon, especially in the diaspora.
Not sure what you mean by “here” — Russia?
Language Hat, presumably. (Not very true even then; I have no idea how to spell my name in Greek, Arabic, or Devanagari, and I’m not even sure about Hebrew even though it’s becoming directly relevant.)
(I guess my nickname in Hebrew would be “ינואר הראשון למאי”. I’m not very sure about the articles…)
Given the relationship of Paiwan phonology in vis-a-vis proto-Austronesian, I thought of something: What if in a parallel universe(s), Paiwan(ic) is the (branch of) language(s) spoken from Shanghai to Xiamen.
@LH, it was an ironical confirmation of what JWB (I suppose ironically) said about certian authoritarian regimes:
The Devanagari version of your name is less important for you than the “original” English spelling. Accordingly, romanisations are somewhat less important for authoritarian regimes than the “original” Chinese spelling….
Here: languagehat.com.
@JWB, yes, the spelling in the “foreign passport” (заграничный паспорт, загранпаспорт, загран) must be based on that in your birth certificate, I think (unless you changed name) and in the internal passport. We have such a thing, it is called passport too and is too a little reddish-brown book.
The ICAO transliteration is a transliteration (from Cyrillic), not a transcription (from Russian). It would not work with Latin (I think for H in CH we could use dots as in Irish…but what to do with C, K, Q?). but Cyrillic alphabets don’t use digraphs.
My idea is that for most Russian speakers it is not really the question of “preferred” Romanisation – just as most users of Latin script don’t have a “preferred” Cyrillic spelling of their names. We have assorted ideas like:
“I have seen this name spelled with C in Europe, so maybe C is better. On the other hand K is both as in Cyrillic and Greek”,
“isn’t -kh- confusing for them [speakers of other languages]? Do they know how to read it and do they like it? Or should I write h?”
“I studied French in school, I like -ou-”
I use two spellings of my surname. One is “lazy”: the same transliterations that Russians would use when writing to each other. I use it when I need to register a mail box with my name and I use it with freinds. The other is more in line with the traditional transcription.
The travel passport matters because you may want (just in case) use the same spelling in documents.
But I only identify with my short name. And I don’t have strong views here: there are several possible ways to render it in Latin and if someone spelled it differently, that would be just fine (and even interesting). It just does not happen, but Arabic speakers sometimes modify vowels.
To be clear, the mindset I was identifying was not from my perspective per se “authoritarian,” merely ethnocentric/Sinocentric, and the fact that it may have been stronger on Taiwan during a period of authoritarian rule is largely a historical coincidence. The Latin alphabet has certainly proved itself adaptable in Europe and the Americas (among other places) to use by a very wide range of political regimes, including the authoritarian and illiberal.
Of course for a Chinese speaker/writer/reader the “original” verson of her name is not romanised.
I know that romanisations are widely used there, but the “main” writing system is still the same as 100 years ago.
It seems for me “my name” is (1) what my freinds call me … (a) then the Greek name. I transliterate my name from Russian, but a more natural choice for me is using already existing English, French etc. spellings of the same Greek name. I don’t use this spelling because I normally use the short form: Russian -ya when attached to a native (for a European) base can be confusing. …. (b) the representation in Cyrillic …. (c) Latin, Arabic, other versions.
(b) is a secondary consideration, while (c) is clearly much less important than (b).
Yes, I type my name in the Latin script sometimes, when texting friends or when registering an account somewhere. But I am less serious about what I use there than I am about “drasvi” here:-)
You might think that the fact that I use romanisations daily and presently more often than Arabisations must mean that I take them seriously.. As a matter of fact, it is just a game for me.
These are my personal concerns. Must be somewhat different for Serbs who use both alphabets in school.
But I think the principle (c) is less important than (b) is also true for bureaucrates. Note that Russian bureaucrates simply follow the rules of ICAO.
The “what does the individual prefer” question for transcription seems to matter mainly if you are actively going to be using said script in your daily life (e.g. migrants between cultures, people who go by different names/variants of names in different contexts).
Most people would probably not think to care how their “real” name would be in a script/writing system they’ve never used and plan on never using.
I think that’s why there’s an asymmetry between Latin script/romanization and other ways of writing. Due to its dominance, many people with names in other scripts will care if they plan on visiting somewhere that uses the Latin alphabet or chat in text with those, particularly Anglophones, that have little ability to read their original script, while for the most part, there is probably less pressure for those whose name only exists officially in Latin alphabet characters to worry about how it would look in another script (often times in an optional or curiosity-related way too, like “wouldn’t it be cool to write my name in Arabic or Chinese characters”, rather than “I really need to do this or others won’t understand me” etc.).
I think a Russian speaker who actively communicates with users of the Latin script in their languages is fully symmetrical to a user of Latin script who communicates with Russian, Persian or Hindi speakers in their languages. In both cases such people are minority, and in both cases I think your main concern is : what it looks like to native speakers?
The asymmetry exists: we can’t even discern individual letters in Arabic writing – or Arabic вязь “knitting” as we informally call it (the term refers to this Cyrillic calligrpaphic style). But personal names matter in interpersonal communication, while the asymmetry mostly affects very impersonal genres: email addresses, URLs etc..
I transliterate my name from Russian, but a more natural choice for me is using already existing English, French etc. spellings of the same Greek name.
This doesn’t work in my case, where a transliteration of my first name is straightforward, but the Greek version (and most of its European spellings) has an extra -as tacked on.
(Good luck with my last name, though. There’s a Ш and a Ч in it and neither of those are particularly convenient to transliterate consistently.)
(The short version of my first name, which is indeed probably what I associate with most, also has some transliteration problems; I have a version that I commonly use myself, but I’ve seen several others and I’m not really bothered by it.)
but Arabic speakers sometimes modify vowels
I know an Alla who reported that in Israel a lot of people called her Ella; the names are spelled the same in Hebrew (אלה) and Ella is a lot more common.
Why not עלה?
I would read it as alé ‘leaf’.
Unpointed Hebrew is simply not equal to the task of spelling foreign words. I recently heard on Israeli TV news the name of the Po river, spelled פו, pronounced “Fu”.
Helen underwent rather strange transformations in Russian. WP:
Народные формы имени — Олена, Олёна, Алёна, Еления, Илена, Ялена; распространённая краткая форма — Лена. Также в русском языке известны варианты имени, заимствованные из западнославянских языков — Гелена (Хелена) — и других европейских — Элен, Элина, Илона[5]. Народная форма имени Алёна используется как самостоятельное личное имя, так может использоваться и краткая форма Лена.
Must be somewhat different for Serbs who use both alphabets in school.
Serbs use a well defined one to one correspondence, so that shifting between Latin and Cyrillic for them is more like shifting between, say, Fraktur and Antiqua than between two totally different writing systems.
Well, yes.
It reminds me that it is difficult to define what is an “alphabet”.
If it is a set of graphical forms, then why do we recognise different forms of the same letter ias “the same letter”?
It is a set of values then the English alphabet has nothign in common with Latin…
@drasvi, it seems to me that defining “an” alphabet is very similar to defining “a” language, and maybe the same concepts can apply. “Latin” and “Cyrillic” are then Dachsprachen, so to speak, with the possibility of borrowing from one to the other to supplement with sound values that are felt lacking (instead of semantic values for languages). While I don’t think the analogy holds in detail, Antiqua and Black Letter certainly feel as distinct regional languages.
There can even be registers and lects — I was just reading about the origin of kana, where it seems that at a certain period the “learned male” register was using unmodified (“regular style”) kanji with a many-to-one mapping to morae for rebus writing purposes, while a “tradesman + female” register used a one-to-one mapping with simplified shapes (the precursor to hiragana). But it was understood as the same writing system.
I recently heard on Israeli TV news the name of the Po river, spelled פו, pronounced “Fu”.
That’s absolutely hilarious.
Jenofonte: Anábasis. Took me a few seconds to figure out who that was when I saw it in a second hand book store. (Names for Classical figures are based on the nominative in Danish tradition).
“While I don’t think the analogy holds in detail, Antiqua and Black Letter certainly feel as distinct regional languages.”
The problem is that the same must be true for Kurrent and Sütterlin) and, accrodingly, handwritten forms in other regions. Or geometrical Kufic (as in this channel‘s logo – I just saw it when googling for something else. But don’t ask me what is this style)
Eventually find more variation within “Latin” then between “Cyrillic” and “Latin” (Arabic remains distinct)
“While I don’t think the analogy holds in detail, Antiqua and Black Letter certainly feel as distinct regional languages.”
The problem is that the same must be true for Kurrent and Sütterlin) and, accrodingly, handwritten forms in other regions. Or geometrical Kufic. Eventually find more variation within “Latin” then between “Cyrillic” and “Latin” (Arabic remains distinct)
geometrical Kufic (as in this channel‘s logo – I just saw it when googling for something else.But don’t ask me what is this style).
I thought about this all when reading von Uslar’s proposal for “Caucasian alphabet”. He published a table, (Cyrillic, Georgian, Armenian, Arabic, Latin) and noted (19th century Russian as read from modern Russian):
“To remove confusions, we will call the alphabet in the first column Caucasian. In the present case it is depicting the Georgian alphabet and every letter of it must be articulated as the corresponding Georgian letter, thus more or less distinctly from the pronunciation it has in the Russian alphabet.”
…with the large exception that ь is only used in digraphs in modern times. (Exception to the exception: the few cases where it’s purely morphological in Russian, like the 2sg ending -шь.)
Really? In Russian it sometimes indicates /j/ sound like in the word варенье. This is not what they teach you in school, but that’s what it is.
This is [nʲ] followed by [j], i.e. нь followed by е; the [j] is part of the е. [nj] would be spelled with ъ, i.e. -нъе, but, apart from a few collisions of verbs with certain prefixes, that’s not native in Russian (or, with /n/, anywhere else in Slavic), and loans where such sequences originally occur tend to get pronounced with palatalized consonants anyway, or so I’ve read.
I understand this explanation (somewhat), but my interpretation is that in this combination ь stands for [j]. In reality, I would guess it replaces a runaway [i] and in a sense is a graphical representation of a vowel-shaped void, which brings [j] in e forward. But more importantly, Russian spelling strives for one letter-one sound correspondence and this fits the bill, because не has no [j] and нье has it. Ergo, ь = [j].
…unless [j] is involved; in that case, [j] is blamed on the following vowel (so the inventory of vowel letters is doubled), unless that’s really not possible, in which case we get й.
The reason seems to be that [j] wasn’t phonemic in OCS; it was just automatically inserted between any vowel clusters, even across word boundaries.
Maybe the issue with transliterating (vs. transcribing) from Latin is not exactly digraphs…How do I represent “h”? I can use г (g), a voiced laryngeal fricative in some languages, but then it merges with “g”.
I can use х [x] : it does not correspond to anything in Latin script.
Thus кх or цх will mean:
х for Irish, ч for English, ш for French, к for Italian…
Usable, but.
And then C K Q and then Ci that sounds as ци or чи or cи:(
Cyrillic did contain digraphs initially.
“oy” for /u/ (now simplified to “y”),
ы (which is, of course, “ъi”) treated as a single letter.
“ioy” (now ю)
“ia” spelled as я now.
And Ѩ Ѭ.