Transliteration Standards
Possible Impact on Internationalization
Letter from John Clews and Evangelos Melagrakis
Chair & Secretary of ISO/TC46/SC2: Conversion of Written Languages
Those involved in developing or using internationalization standards, may find the following information of use, particularly as ISO/TC46/SC2 standards on transliteration provide one possible information source on multilingual sorting, and also provides additional information on how specific scripts are used.
Letter equivalences in transliteration standards may also provide information about possible keyboard equivalences, that may be of use in designing possible non-Latin keyboard layouts.
In addition, ISO/TC46/SC2 also changed the scope of ISO/TC46/SC2/WG8 to cover Transliteration and Computers at its last plenary meeting at the British Standards Institution in Chiswick, London, from 12-14 May 1997.
I am interested in any participation that those of you involved in Internationalization activities may be able to provide, either in meetings or electronically, given your own necessary involvement in the multilingual use of computers.
I am also happy to provided more information about standards in this area: more information about the scope of work of ISO/TC46/SC2, and about electronic resources relating to ISO/TC46/SC2, are provided below.
Needs for transliteration standards:
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 computerized 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 website 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: to avoid distortion, resize your viewer/printer if the word' s origins in the above line is not at the end of a 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 / Oriya * SOGDIAN Chinese
| / 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) together with their own phonetic script (kana in Japanese). Korean now often uses only the phonetic script (Hangul) without using Chinese characters (Hanja).
Scripts not used at state level, and other historical scripts, are not shown above.
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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 standardization 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
phone:: +44 (0) 1423 888 432
http://www.elot.gr/tc46sc2/
E. Melagrakis, ELOT
313 Acharnon Str., GR-111 45 Athens, Greece
email: eem@elot.gr
phone: +30 1 201 9890
http://www.elot.gr/tc46sc2/
