tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Oct 27 06:49:54 1995
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Re: Name transliteration rules?
- From: "Mark E. Shoulson" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Name transliteration rules?
- Date: Fri, 27 Oct 1995 09:49:53 -0400
- In-reply-to: <[email protected]> (message from JarnoPeschier on Thu, 26 Oct 1995 06:54:05 -0700)
>Date: Thu, 26 Oct 1995 06:54:05 -0700
>From: Jarno Peschier <[email protected]>
>[Quoting Mark E. Shoulson]
>>
>> Names are strange puppies. One generally doesn't "translate" them from one
>> language to another. How would you "translate" 'Yassir Arafat' into
>> English? You don't; you just spell it with English letters. And "Yitzhak
>> Rabin" doesn't become "he-will-laugh"... It just gets transliterated.
>Well, the only exception I can think of right now is the use of Indian
>(as in Native American) names. These are often translated (in books
>and movies of course; I don't know about the use of those names in the
>Real World, today and in the last century)...
Yes. I find it kind of interesting the way I as an English-speaker find
names that are understandable to sound so odd. :) We're so used to names
being just sounds that we forget that they started out as something
meaningful, and so when we come across a language that preserves that and
actually *translates* its names back, it sounds strange to us.
'Course, that's more true (in English) with men's names than women's
names. I can offhand think of very few men's names in English which have
direct English meanings (maybe "Cliff"? :}), but among women's
names... Rose, Pearl, Heather, Ivy, Ruby, Violet, Daisy...
~mark