All Topics  
Scientific transliteration

 

 
   Email Print
   Bookmark   Link
 

 

Scientific transliteration
 
 
  Topics Scientific transliteration Topic Home

Scientific transliteration, variously called academic, linguistic, or scholarly transliteration, is an international system for transliteration
Transliteration

Transliteration is the practice of transcribing a word or text written in one writing system into another writing system or system of rules for such practice....
 of text from the Cyrillic
Cyrillic alphabet

The Cyrillic alphabet is a family of alphabets, subsets of which are used by five Slavic languages national languages as well as non-Slavic . It is also used by many other languages of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Siberia and other languages in the past....
 to the Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin....
 (romanization
Romanization

In linguistics, romanization is the representation of a written word or spoken speech with the Latin alphabet, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system ....
). This system is most often seen in linguistics
Linguistics

Linguistics is the science study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of Meaning ....
 publications on Slavic languages
Slavic languages

File:Slavic europe.svgThe Slavic languages , a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia....
.

The scientific transliteration system is roughly as phonemic as is the orthography of the language transliterated. The deviations are with ?, where the transliteration makes clear that two phonemes are involved, and ?, where it fails to represent the (monophonemic) affricate with a single letter.






Discussion
Ask a question about 'Scientific transliteration'
Start a new discussion about 'Scientific transliteration'
Answer questions from other users
Full Discussion Forum



Encyclopedia


Scientific transliteration, variously called academic, linguistic, or scholarly transliteration, is an international system for transliteration
Transliteration

Transliteration is the practice of transcribing a word or text written in one writing system into another writing system or system of rules for such practice....
 of text from the Cyrillic
Cyrillic alphabet

The Cyrillic alphabet is a family of alphabets, subsets of which are used by five Slavic languages national languages as well as non-Slavic . It is also used by many other languages of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Siberia and other languages in the past....
 to the Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin....
 (romanization
Romanization

In linguistics, romanization is the representation of a written word or spoken speech with the Latin alphabet, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system ....
). This system is most often seen in linguistics
Linguistics

Linguistics is the science study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of Meaning ....
 publications on Slavic languages
Slavic languages

File:Slavic europe.svgThe Slavic languages , a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia....
.

The scientific transliteration system is roughly as phonemic as is the orthography of the language transliterated. The deviations are with ?, where the transliteration makes clear that two phonemes are involved, and ?, where it fails to represent the (monophonemic) affricate with a single letter. The transliteration system is based on the Croatian alphabet
Croatian alphabet

Gaj's Latin alphabet is a variant of the Croatian language Latin alphabet devised by Croat Ljudevit Gaj, in his 1830 book, Kratka osnova horvatsko-slavenskog pravopisanja ....
, in which each letter corresponds directly to a Cyrillic letter of the related Serbian language
Serbian language

name=Serbian|nativename=|pronunciation=['sr?pski?]|familycolor=Indo-European|map=|states=See below under "Official status", besides that in Croatia and as an immigrant's language spread over Central Europe and Western Europe, as well as Northern America...
. It was codified in the 1898 Prussian Instructions for libraries, or Preußische Instruktionen (PI). It can also be used to romanize the early Glagolitic alphabet
Glagolitic alphabet

The Glagolitic alphabet , also known as Glagolitsa, is the oldest known Slavic peoples alphabet. The name was not coined until many centuries after its creation, and comes from the Old Slavic glagol? "utterance" ....
, which has a close correspondence to Cyrillic.

Scientific transliteration is often adapted to serve as a phonetic alphabet.

Scientific transliteration was the basis for the ISO 9
ISO 9

The international standard ISO 9 establishes a system for the transliteration into Latin alphabet of Cyrillic alphabet constituting the alphabets of many Slavic languages and some non-Slavic languages....
 transliteration standard. While linguistic transliteration tries to preserve the original language’s pronunciation
Pronunciation

"Pronunciation" refers to the way a word or a language is usually spoken, or the manner in which someone utters a word. If someone said to have "correct pronunciation," then it refers to both within a particular dialect....
 to a certain degree, the latest version of the ISO standard (ISO 9:1995) has abandoned this concept which was still found in ISO/R 9-1968 and is now restricted to a universal 1:1 mapping of letters. It thus allows for unambiguous reverse transliteration into the original Cyrillic text and is language-independent.

The previous official Soviet romanization system, GOST 16876-71
GOST 16876-71

GOST 16876-71 is a romanization system devised by the National Administration for Geodesy and Cartography of the Soviet Union. It is based on the scientific transliteration system used in linguistics....
, is also based on scientific transliteration, but using Latin h for Cyrillic ? instead of Latin x. Most countries using Cyrillic script now have adopted GOST 7.79 instead, which is equivalent to ISO 9.

Representing all of the necessary diacritics on computers requires Unicode
Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate Character expressed in most of the world's writing systems....
, Latin-2, Latin-4, or Latin-7 encoding.

* Archaic letters

† Church Slavonic Iotified A (IA)

Letters in parentheses are older or alternate transliterations. Ukrainian and Belarusian apostrophe are not transcribed. Early Cyrillic letter koppa
Koppa

Koppa is an archaic letter of the Cyrillic alphabet, originally derived from the Greek language letter Qoppa. Whilst it existed in the Early Cyrillic alphabet, it is no longer used in any national languages using Cyrillic....
 (?, ?) was used only for transliterating Greek, and for its numeric value
Cyrillic numerals

Cyrillic numerals was a numbering system derived from the Cyrillic alphabet, used by South Slavs and East Slavs Slavic peoples. The system was used in Russia as late as the early 1700s when Peter I of Russia replaced it with the Arabic numeral system....
, so it is omitted. ISO 9:1995 is provided for comparison.

See also

  • Romanization of Bulgarian
    Romanization of Bulgarian

    Romanization of Bulgarian is the transliteration of text in the Bulgarian language from the Cyrillic alphabet into the Latin alphabet. This table lists several transliteration schemes:...
  • Romanization of Russian
    Romanization of Russian

    Romanization of the Russian alphabet is the process of transliteration the Russian language from the Cyrillic alphabet into the Latin alphabet. Such transliteration is necessary for writing Russian names and other words in the alphabet of one's own language....
  • Romanization of Ukrainian
    Romanization of Ukrainian

    The romanization or Latinization of Ukrainian is the representation of the Ukrainian language using Latin alphabet. Ukrainian is natively written in its own Ukrainian alphabet, a variation of Cyrillic alphabet....


External links

  • —history of the transliteration of Slavic languages into Latin alphabets
  • of Ohio State University Slavic Studies (PDF)—Scientific transliteration for various languages is shown in a table on p. 4.