tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun May 21 22:01:53 1995
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transcribing (Re: coffee)
On Thu, 18 May 1995 14:58:57 -0400, "Silauren, Half-Elven" <[email protected]> said:
> On Thu, 18 May 1995, Anthony Curran wrote:
>> And I'd like to make a stab at transliterating them.
>> How about <<la'te'>> and <<qap'uchIno'>>.
> how about not transliterating at all? many many peoples been
> transliterating stuff lately, and i feel the need to publicly
> state my utter dislike for transliteration.
[...]
> i for one don't pronounce "latte" as "lah' tey'". i don't know
> anyone that does.
It is one thing to disagree with one particular transcription (not
transliteration: it's the sound, not the letters, that we're trying to
get across) and another to declare that words are not to be transcribed.
I agree that {_la'te'_} is unnecessarily exotic (those glottal stops are
not present in the original), but I don't see what you have against
{_latte_} and {_qappuchchIno_}.
> and i keep seeing this kind of poor transliteration -- recently
> someone tried to pass <*Dorov> or something similar as a
> transliteration of "Dwarf".
{_Dorov_} was my klingonisation (ie transcription, not transliteration)
of _Dwarf_. If you think it's a poor one, let's see yours.
> no, that just doesn't make the cut, i'm afraid.
It does. See below.
> so here's my plea: stop transliterating! just stop! [...]
> after all, English didn't transliterate "latte" when it borrowed
> the word from Italian; if it did, we'd either spell it differently or
> pronounce it "lat" (rhymes with "cat").
False analogy. English does not use a phonetic orthography; Klingon does.
In English the spelling of a word has little to do with its pronunciation;
in Klingon the connexion is as tight as they go. English spells loanwords
as they are spelt in the source languages. Few languages with phonetic
orthographies ever do that. When an English or Italian word makes its way
into Russian, Hebrew, Persian, Hindi or Japanese, its sound is modified
according to the phonology to the host language and it is written in
its script, following its orthographic rules, and it does make the cut.
If _Elf_ can become _erufu_ in Japanese, it can become {'elev} in Klingon.
--'Iwvan