4 ms·

I totally agree. I'm a native speaker and my Arabic name (ضياء) has no definite, accurate transcription in English for another reason. Arabic language has many

by Mafana0 16y ago

I totally agree. I'm a native speaker and my Arabic name (ضياء) has no definite, accurate transcription in English for another reason. Arabic language has many letters and sounds western languages don't have equivalents of and therefore foreigners are completely unable no pronounce. Another point is that vowels have different characteristics in different languages; height of the tongue, backness, roundedness, nasalization, ..etc, make it almost impossible to write the correct equivalent for some Arabic vowels in English. For example, we have a word (هيل; means cardamom) whose vowel length is between hail and hell that I can't think of any accurate way to transcript in English.

DarkShikari 16y ago
I don't think vowel differences are sufficient to deem a language impossible to romanize. Japanese has been romanized effectively for decades despite the fact that Japanese vowels are quite different from English ones. I think this comes down to two competing approaches in transliteration: 1. Transcribe the original non-roman text into something that a native English speaker would read correctly without help. This never works well due to vowel differences and accents, but nevertheless it works well enough that it's very popular. An example of this failing horribly: Hiroshima: often pronounced Hih-RO-shih-mah. Actually pronounced Hee-roh-shee-mah (nevermind the Japanese R). 2. Romanization without intent to be pronounceable. Nihon-Shiki romanization seems to use this approach: it's unreadable by English speakers, but unlike other romanization schemes, provides a one-to-one mapping to the original kana, i.e. it loses no information. I think it's important to note as well that "roman letters" != "English"; Nihon-Shiki is an example of this, the creation of roman letters intended to be pronounced by non-English speakers.

by Mafana0 16y ago

DarkShikari 16y ago

I don't think vowel differences are sufficient to deem a language impossible to romanize. Japanese has been romanized effectively for decades despite the fact that Japanese vowels are quite different from English ones. I think this comes down to two competing approaches in transliteration: 1. Transcribe the original non-roman text into something that a native English speaker would read correctly without help. This never works well due to vowel differences and accents, but nevertheless it works well enough that it's very popular. An example of this failing horribly: Hiroshima: often pronounced Hih-RO-shih-mah. Actually pronounced Hee-roh-shee-mah (nevermind the Japanese R). 2. Romanization without intent to be pronounceable. Nihon-Shiki romanization seems to use this approach: it's unreadable by English speakers, but unlike other romanization schemes, provides a one-to-one mapping to the original kana, i.e. it loses no information. I think it's important to note as well that "roman letters" != "English"; Nihon-Shiki is an example of this, the creation of roman letters intended to be pronounced by non-English speakers.