Transliteration systems

What you perfer for transliteration? Phonetic, or orthographic?

For example, I think English uses Orthografic. "Czechoslovakia" can not even be guessed if you don't know it. Spanish uses phonetic "Checoslovaquia".

Russian and Japanese are also phonetic.

What does your language use?

Sometimes Spanish uses orthographic transliteration. For example, in Spanish, "whiskey" can be spelled either "whisky" or "güisqui", but the spelling "whisky" is preferred.

Sorry, I didn't mean to submit my post... I hit Enter, meaning to start a new paragraph, and the form submitted instead. I must not have been paying attention to what I was doing.

Anyway, both Spanish and Japanese sometimes make orthographic borrowings, and then they change the pronunciation to match. I can't think of any examples right now, but a case where English does it is the word "wiener"... the Germans pronounce it "veener", but we say "weener" because of how it's spelled.

I do have an example for Japanese, but it's not a great one... but they pronounce the word "studio" as "sutajio". Apparently, they thought it was pronounced like "study", so they used an "a" sound (to approximate the schwa) instead of a "u" sound.

- Kef

But english never makes phonetic transliterations?

Kef, what you said about Spanish is true, but we would rarely see the word "whisky" spelled "güisqui" in Spanish.
I think this is a good question, I'm not sure. I think that as they don't mind very much how the word is spelled in English, they just think about how it's pronounced and then borrow the original spelling. Or is there any exception?

Pete from Peru

Hey Frankie,

करना आप आवश्यकता आपका संदेशा ओर होना अनुवाद करना ओर पिछवाडे का?

Translation: Do you want your messages to be translated to Hindi?

Must be, English speakers are so acustomed to crazy pronounciation in their natural words, it doesn't bother them.

<< But english never makes phonetic transliterations? >>

Generally it doesn't... it sucks sometimes, especially when it comes to things like using Pinyin for representing the sounds of Mandarin. Although Pinyin is fine for use inside China and it's OK for use by students of Mandarin, ordinary English speakers simply aren't going to know how to pronounce words like "Xiang" or "Qin" correctly.

- Kef