Newsgroups: soc.culture.bulgaria
Subject: transliteration
From: lihouba@dapsas1 (Christo Houbaviy)
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1992 22:56:17 GMT
Organization: Weizmann Institute of Science, Computing Centre

In article <43030@imag.imag.fr> serasset@imag.fr (Gilles Serasset) writes:
>In article <1992Nov2.182238.23774@wisipc.weizmann.ac.il> Christo
>Houbaviy, lihouba@dapsas1 writes:
>>
>>I would suggest swapping the j and x because x looks like >|< and j has
>some
>>use as a 'softener'. Also see my other posting in this thread for more
>>reasons.
>>
>I personaly think it is a really bad idea to use graphical analogy
>between roman and cyrillic to define a transcription.

So do I. I proposed using graphical analogy only for letters that do
not have Latin phonetic counterparts. The original poster suggested
using x instead of the cyrillic letter er-malqk and j for zh. X does
not represent any useful sound in Bulgarian and does not look like
er-malqk. J rarely has the value of zh in the English language. This
is why I proposed the swap.

>I don't speak Bulgarian (yet), and my native alphabet is not cyrillic. It
>will be impossible for me to figure wht is a particular letter:
>   - Does it figure the same sound as in english (for example),
>   - Does it ressemble to one of the cyrillic characters,
>   - Do I have to get additional information in order to know what it is ?

This is what this entire discussion is for.

>NO, NO, NO.
>
>First of all, if you want to define a transcription, don't forget that
>it's aim is to allows readers to easily transcript from this
>transcription to the cyrillic alphabet.
>BUT IT IS NOT THE MAJORITY OF THE CASE.
>In most of the case, people want to READ the posts.
>You first have to define a READABLE transcription before defining a
>TRANSCRIPTABLE transcription.

I am not sure what you meant by the above paragraph. In particular
what is a transcriptable transcription? Of course a transcription has
to be readable and of course its purpose is to allow readers 'to
easily transcript from this transcription to the Cyrillic alphabet'.
What we are trying to do here (or at least should) is to find the
most convenient transliteration. One that will allow us to write
Bulgarian in Latin characters in a way that is the most easy
to read, the most easy to type, assures a one-to one ASCII
correspondence, is the most easy to remember, is obvious to everyone,
is natural, can be understood by people who do not speak Bulgarian,
has a single character for each Cyrillic letter etc. All that is
obviously impossible to put together so we are trying to reach a
compromise.


>>It would be great if anyone could think of a single-letter substitution
>for yu
>>and ya (special characters included). What about @=ja %=ju?
>
>It would really be great if you forget it now.
>
>How do I pronounce "@"? and "%"?
>Personally, I pronounce @: ampersand, or at (depending of the context).
>                        %: percent.

Well, you are right that special characters should be avoided. Texts
that contain them look to me like uuencoded binaries. But certainly
you didn't have to get so angry about my proposition. It was merely a
suggestion. What I thought of was a transcription that has one
symbol only for each Cyrillic letter. Obviously this can not be done
without the use of special characters as the number of letters in the
Cyrillic alphabet is greater than the number of Latin letters.


>I don't want to be obliged to download an explanation file from a site I
>have never eared of.
>I don't want to be obliged to learn for a transcription.


A perfectly legal concern. However, if a transcription scheme is
developed it will certainly be posted to this newsgroup on a regular
basis and there is also the FAQ being written.


>
>I want to be sure that if I print a post in the transcription, I can made
>it read by Bulgarian that never eared of the net.
>I want to be able to pronounce it if I want to read the post to a
>Bulgarian friend via the phone.
>I don't want to figure if it looks like a cyrillic character.


It seems to me that you will have problems in doing that if you don't
know any Bulgarian no matter what the transcription scheme is. On the
other hand most of the transcription schemes suggested so far should
be obvious to Bulgarian speakers.


>I can't propose any transcription (I don't know Cyrillic enough) but when
>I see one transcription, I can say if I will read it or not.

Your comments will of course be appreciated.

>Gilles Serasset,

--
Christo Houbaviy [lihouba@dapsas.weizmann.ac.il]
Department of Molecular Genetics and Virology
The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel