Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ethiopia/Transliteration/Archive 1

message: It seems that ዮም and llywrch agree that we should use two systems of transliteration, a simpler one for article names and as the common transliteration throughout the article, and a strict/complex one that would be given once at the first appearance of the transliterated term that would be more accurate and hopefully reversible. I believe this solves also Mike Gasser's uneasiness with too complex transliteration that won't be understood by non-specialists. If this can be agreed upon, then the proposals on Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethiopia/Transliteration should be divided into two -- one for each system of transliteration. So, what do you think? yhever 02:33, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Sure, but I don't think that we need two pages. Two subsets would be fine. I will add a proposal for both relatively soon. — ዮም (Yom) | contribs • Talk 02:39, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Simpler version vs. Strict transliteration 

message: ====Consonants====
(box stolen from MG)
Ethiopian Semitic Consonant Transcription
IPA     	p'	t'	k'	 	s'	 	 	 	 	 	 	      	          	 	
Proposal	ṗ 	ṭ 	ḳ 	č̣	ṣ 	č	ǧ	š	ž	ñ	ʾ	x or ḫ	q/q̄/x' ???	ḥ	ʽ
ዮም (Yom) | contribs • Talk 03:13, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: For ኸ and ቐ I would propose using x and ẋ. I also agree that ḳ is better than q for the strict transl. For ኘ I think ñ is better than ň. yhever 11:45, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I have no problems with x and ẋ. ň was just a typo for ñ because of the bad resolution on my screen. I've changed it now. — ዮም (Yom) | contribs • Talk 03:13, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

text: The trouble with those dots is that they're not found in many fonts, and in fact the one under č doesn't look at all right in the font I have (the dot is in the wrong place).  Why not apostrophe, which is a pretty standard way of representing ejectives across languages (much more so than the dots in fact)?  Also, do we really have to go with ǧ?  This is not part of IPA or any language's orthography that I know of (except Esperanto!), and j would agree with the simple notation.  Shouldn't we be trying to make the two transcription styles resemble each other as far as possible? For the same reason, why not q in place of ḳ? OK, I understand the reasons; it represents a different consonant in IPA and Arabic transliteration, but it is pretty standard in linguistic transcriptions of Ethio-Semitic. — MikeG (talk) 03:49, 15 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Hmm, I hadn't thought of that problem (it shows up fine for me). The "č dot" problem is from something else, though. All the other characters are one letter, but the "č dot" is two separate characters (I copied it from your transcription, and in the editing box, the dot is clearly separate from the č, over to the right some, but when parsed it comes out a little off to the left, but clearly under the č). The first letter is č, while the second is a dot, but different from a period, and it is supposed to be parsed as going under the preceding character. If there's a single character for č dot, however, I don't think this will be a problem. Do you have a problem with the other ones? I'm not certain, but I do believe that all of the others should be completely supported by most browsers (ignoring relatively old ones). Someone who's knowledgable in these things should confirm or deny this, though (is there some sort of place where we can ask or look it up in Wikipedia?). regarding ǧ, I picked it because it's one character, unlike dj, which can often be confusing (I know many an American who is baffled regarding the pronounciation of Djibouti) and therefore no better than ǧ (you're objecting because of its uncertain pronounciation for non-specialists, right?). It's also used in Arabic transliteration, I believe, and it's the transliteration used for the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica. I have no objection to "j" for simplified, but it does represent a sound more like "y" for IPA and, being the complex transliteration, could easily be confused for that sound. We could use the IPA ʤ, but that seems to confound your concerns even further (that people wouldn't know how it's pronounced). Regarding q, the letter used to represent is cognate with Latin Q, but, as you said, it represents a diffrent sound than what we're transcribing. As q and k aren't pronounced differently, using a diacritic is actually better in showing the distinctness of the sound. I'm flexible with regards to ḳ vs. q, but I'm worried about what we would use for Semitic comparison articles (e.g. List of Proto-Semitic stems and Proto-Semitic language), where q is used for a pharyngealized k, and an Ethiosemitic "q" would fail to show the distinction in sound. Perhaps we could make "q" standard for most linguistic articles but not for ones comparing pronounciation with other Semitic languages? But that would be confusing, as only a few consonants would change and readers would be confused. To be honest, I like the look of q better as it's more often used, but there are problems for the two articles I mentioned above. — ዮም (Yom) | contribs • Talk 04:50, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

text: On second thought, this might not be a problem, however, as there's already a general consensus for transliteration for Semitic languages in general (which may or may not agree with the individual language transliterations; I'm not sure). — ዮም (Yom) | contribs • Talk 04:52, 15 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  I used two characters for the č with dot because there's no single Unicode character for the combined symbol.  I used the "combining dot below" character (hex #0323) to make it.  I think it would be preferrable to have a single Unicode character for this phoneme, but there doesn't even seem to be a c with dot below (though there is one with dot above: #010B). As far as j is concerned, it does represent a different sound in IPA (we're using y for that), but it's pretty standard for ʤ in the American variant of IPA with the caron added: ǰ (Unicode #01F0, see the "Americanist" characters on the IPA page, which include the other characters with carons that we're talking about using). — MikeG (talk) 15:26, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

text:  One possibility would be to use c for ʧ and ċ (#010B) for ʧ'.  c does represent a somewhat different sound in IPA (palatal stop), but most people probably would not know this (it's a pretty rare phoneme). A compromise would be to stick with č for ʧ and use the single character ċ for ʧ'. — MikeG (talk) 15:46, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

text:  I guess we use a superscript w for the labialized consonants (kʷ, etc.)?  And for the palatalized velars of Western Gurage a superscript y (kʸ, gʸ, ḳʸ, xʸ)?  For Ge'ez ሠ and ፀ, I suggest we use the "standard" ś and ṣ´ (except that, as you can see, I couldn't figure out how to add both the dot and the acute accent to the s for ፀ). Also Z(w)ay has an implosive d ([ɗ], apparently borrowed from Cushitic, the consonant that's written dh in Oromo orthography).  I propose we use ḍ for this since it's glottalized like the other consonants we're using dots for. — MikeG (talk) 02:41, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Regarding the superscripts, no disagreement here. Regarding Sawt, however, I'm not sure if the standard ś is such a good idea, as it represents a proto-semitic phenome continued by śat, which could have indeed been pronounced [ś] (later s, though I'm not sure how early this is). ḍ might also be a problem, since it is a variant transliteration of Ge'ez Tsappa/ḍappa, which is no different from modern Tsaday (Tsade (letter)). Is there anything wrong with using the IPA ɗ in this case? I would rather prefer the IPA transcription. — ዮም (Yom) | contribs • Talk 03:25, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  No, ɗ would be fine (and for this very limited case there are no competing traditions to worry about). — MikeG (talk) 21:33, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

text: I think it should be like that: ቀ should be q in the simple transcription (since it is a simple letter) but ḳ in the complex transcription (to make it more coherent with the other emphatic consonants). Thus, similarly, ጨ should be č̣ in the complex transcription. As for its simple transcription, it depends on the decision about emphatic consonants in general (beside q and ts) in the simple transcription. I have not made up my mind yet. yhever 14:33, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with what yhever stated above wrt the complex transliteration. The simple transliteration is still up for grabs. The real outstanding issue is, as yhever said, the simple transliteration (i.e. do we distinguish between ተ and ጠ, ቸ and ጨ, and ፐ and ጰ or no?). I don't think that the č + dot transliteration will be that big of a problem. Remember, it's the complex one, so there's always the possibility that people won't be able to see the symbols (we could have a superscript question makr next to it or the Ge'ez script, like they have done for Japanese, to link people directly to various fonts they can get for Ge'ez as well as to see all of the transliteration symbols) — ዮም (Yom) | contribs • Talk • E 18:07, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

text: OK.  I'll go along with you guys on the dots for the ejectives, in the interest of making the relationship to emphatics in other Semitic languages clear.  But, as yom suggests, I think we need to make it easy for people to read these articles, which should not be just for linguists and Semiticists. If I'm not mistaken, we've now agreed on everything (both consonants and vowels) for the complex transcription. — MikeG (talk) 13:01, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

text: My original proposal included allowing o and u optionally as the rounded allophones of e and i, respectively. yhever 11:46, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry, I forgot to add that; I added it now. — ዮም (Yom) | contribs • Talk 15:07, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

text: I assume it will be OK to modify this for other ES languages.  For example, in Tigre the 1st and 4th vowels differ mainly in length, and Raz uses a for the 1st.  Leslau does the same for Ge'ez in his concise dictionary (1: a, 4: ā). And Silt'e has the 5 short and 5 long vowels borrowed from Cushitic, with short a filling the 1st order position.  — MikeG (talk) 03:45, 16 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, for tigre, anything but a and ā for 1st and 4th, respectively, would be less than desirable. The same goes for Ge'ez. Also, Shin/sin (Ge'ez Sawt) will have to be distinguished from Sat. The former represents both š and s (with the shift being š->s; cp. USBGN negash and nigus); this is a consonantal issue, but we obviously can't apply these vowels to all Ethiosemitic languages (Gurage languages all have 10 vowels, don't they?). The Gurage languages should be relatively simple using the letters aeiou for short (those are their vowels, right?), and with lines over them (āēīōū) for long). What about Harari/Haderé? Did it adopt/keep long [a:] from Arabic too (well, we're already using ā for all, but I mean is first order short a?)? I don't think this'll be too big of a problem, though. — ዮም (Yom) | contribs • Talk 05:00, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

text:  Northern Gurage (Soddo) and some Western Gurage (at least Chaha) have the familiar seven vowels of Amharic (more or less).  Eastern (Silt'e and I think Zway, though I'm not sure) have the Oromo vowels.  yhever should know about the other Gurage languages.  I'll check on Harari.  I know there are some long vowels.  yhever probably knows. In any case, I doubt there will be a problem. — MikeG (talk) 13:28, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

text:  It turns out that Z(w)ay has the same 5 short and 5 long vowels that Silt'e has (I found a great new book on Zay).  In addition to 1st order, Harari has long and short [a], so we could use e, a, and ā for these.  Inor (Ennemor) will be the hard one since (according to Berhanu and Hetzron's book), it has 8 short and 8 long vowels.  They argue the the long vowels are really double vowels, so we could represent them by doubling the short vowel symbol.  The short vowels include roughly the Amharic set plus /æ/, so I guess we could just use the symbol æ for this 8th vowel.  More complicated in Inor is the fact that vowels and some consonants (other than consonants that are already nasal) can be nasalized.  I guess we could use the standard tilde for this, but that might not work together with the macron.  Maybe we should worry about Inor when get to that article. — MikeG (talk) 02:25, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Complex

message: (box stolen from MG)
Ethiopian Semitic Consonant Transcription
IPA     	p'	t'	k'	 	s'	 	 	 	 	 	 	      	          	 	
Proposal	ṗ 	ṭ 	ḳ 	č̣	ṣ 	č	ǧ	š	ž	ñ	ʾ	x or ḫ	q/q̄/x' ???	ḥ	ʽ
ዮም (Yom) | contribs • Talk 03:13, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: For ኸ and ቐ I would propose using x and ẋ. I also agree that ḳ is better than q for the strict transl. For ኘ I think ñ is better than ň. yhever 11:45, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I have no problems with x and ẋ. ň was just a typo for ñ because of the bad resolution on my screen. I've changed it now. — ዮም (Yom) | contribs • Talk 03:13, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

text: The trouble with those dots is that they're not found in many fonts, and in fact the one under č doesn't look at all right in the font I have (the dot is in the wrong place).  Why not apostrophe, which is a pretty standard way of representing ejectives across languages (much more so than the dots in fact)?  Also, do we really have to go with ǧ?  This is not part of IPA or any language's orthography that I know of (except Esperanto!), and j would agree with the simple notation.  Shouldn't we be trying to make the two transcription styles resemble each other as far as possible? For the same reason, why not q in place of ḳ? OK, I understand the reasons; it represents a different consonant in IPA and Arabic transliteration, but it is pretty standard in linguistic transcriptions of Ethio-Semitic. — MikeG (talk) 03:49, 15 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Hmm, I hadn't thought of that problem (it shows up fine for me). The "č dot" problem is from something else, though. All the other characters are one letter, but the "č dot" is two separate characters (I copied it from your transcription, and in the editing box, the dot is clearly separate from the č, over to the right some, but when parsed it comes out a little off to the left, but clearly under the č). The first letter is č, while the second is a dot, but different from a period, and it is supposed to be parsed as going under the preceding character. If there's a single character for č dot, however, I don't think this will be a problem. Do you have a problem with the other ones? I'm not certain, but I do believe that all of the others should be completely supported by most browsers (ignoring relatively old ones). Someone who's knowledgable in these things should confirm or deny this, though (is there some sort of place where we can ask or look it up in Wikipedia?). regarding ǧ, I picked it because it's one character, unlike dj, which can often be confusing (I know many an American who is baffled regarding the pronounciation of Djibouti) and therefore no better than ǧ (you're objecting because of its uncertain pronounciation for non-specialists, right?). It's also used in Arabic transliteration, I believe, and it's the transliteration used for the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica. I have no objection to "j" for simplified, but it does represent a sound more like "y" for IPA and, being the complex transliteration, could easily be confused for that sound. We could use the IPA ʤ, but that seems to confound your concerns even further (that people wouldn't know how it's pronounced). Regarding q, the letter used to represent is cognate with Latin Q, but, as you said, it represents a diffrent sound than what we're transcribing. As q and k aren't pronounced differently, using a diacritic is actually better in showing the distinctness of the sound. I'm flexible with regards to ḳ vs. q, but I'm worried about what we would use for Semitic comparison articles (e.g. List of Proto-Semitic stems and Proto-Semitic language), where q is used for a pharyngealized k, and an Ethiosemitic "q" would fail to show the distinction in sound. Perhaps we could make "q" standard for most linguistic articles but not for ones comparing pronounciation with other Semitic languages? But that would be confusing, as only a few consonants would change and readers would be confused. To be honest, I like the look of q better as it's more often used, but there are problems for the two articles I mentioned above. — ዮም (Yom) | contribs • Talk 04:50, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

text: On second thought, this might not be a problem, however, as there's already a general consensus for transliteration for Semitic languages in general (which may or may not agree with the individual language transliterations; I'm not sure). — ዮም (Yom) | contribs • Talk 04:52, 15 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  I used two characters for the č with dot because there's no single Unicode character for the combined symbol.  I used the "combining dot below" character (hex #0323) to make it.  I think it would be preferrable to have a single Unicode character for this phoneme, but there doesn't even seem to be a c with dot below (though there is one with dot above: #010B). As far as j is concerned, it does represent a different sound in IPA (we're using y for that), but it's pretty standard for ʤ in the American variant of IPA with the caron added: ǰ (Unicode #01F0, see the "Americanist" characters on the IPA page, which include the other characters with carons that we're talking about using). — MikeG (talk) 15:26, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

text:  One possibility would be to use c for ʧ and ċ (#010B) for ʧ'.  c does represent a somewhat different sound in IPA (palatal stop), but most people probably would not know this (it's a pretty rare phoneme). A compromise would be to stick with č for ʧ and use the single character ċ for ʧ'. — MikeG (talk) 15:46, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

text:  I guess we use a superscript w for the labialized consonants (kʷ, etc.)?  And for the palatalized velars of Western Gurage a superscript y (kʸ, gʸ, ḳʸ, xʸ)?  For Ge'ez ሠ and ፀ, I suggest we use the "standard" ś and ṣ´ (except that, as you can see, I couldn't figure out how to add both the dot and the acute accent to the s for ፀ). Also Z(w)ay has an implosive d ([ɗ], apparently borrowed from Cushitic, the consonant that's written dh in Oromo orthography).  I propose we use ḍ for this since it's glottalized like the other consonants we're using dots for. — MikeG (talk) 02:41, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Regarding the superscripts, no disagreement here. Regarding Sawt, however, I'm not sure if the standard ś is such a good idea, as it represents a proto-semitic phenome continued by śat, which could have indeed been pronounced [ś] (later s, though I'm not sure how early this is). ḍ might also be a problem, since it is a variant transliteration of Ge'ez Tsappa/ḍappa, which is no different from modern Tsaday (Tsade (letter)). Is there anything wrong with using the IPA ɗ in this case? I would rather prefer the IPA transcription. — ዮም (Yom) | contribs • Talk 03:25, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  No, ɗ would be fine (and for this very limited case there are no competing traditions to worry about). — MikeG (talk) 21:33, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

text: I think it should be like that: ቀ should be q in the simple transcription (since it is a simple letter) but ḳ in the complex transcription (to make it more coherent with the other emphatic consonants). Thus, similarly, ጨ should be č̣ in the complex transcription. As for its simple transcription, it depends on the decision about emphatic consonants in general (beside q and ts) in the simple transcription. I have not made up my mind yet. yhever 14:33, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with what yhever stated above wrt the complex transliteration. The simple transliteration is still up for grabs. The real outstanding issue is, as yhever said, the simple transliteration (i.e. do we distinguish between ተ and ጠ, ቸ and ጨ, and ፐ and ጰ or no?). I don't think that the č + dot transliteration will be that big of a problem. Remember, it's the complex one, so there's always the possibility that people won't be able to see the symbols (we could have a superscript question makr next to it or the Ge'ez script, like they have done for Japanese, to link people directly to various fonts they can get for Ge'ez as well as to see all of the transliteration symbols) — ዮም (Yom) | contribs • Talk • E 18:07, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

text: OK.  I'll go along with you guys on the dots for the ejectives, in the interest of making the relationship to emphatics in other Semitic languages clear.  But, as yom suggests, I think we need to make it easy for people to read these articles, which should not be just for linguists and Semiticists. If I'm not mistaken, we've now agreed on everything (both consonants and vowels) for the complex transcription. — MikeG (talk) 13:01, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Consonants

message: This is Yhever's proposal with the more specific vowel lengths included. I don't believe anyone has a problem with this for the specific transliteration.
Ethiopian Semitic Vowel Transcription
IPA     	ለ []    	ሉ [u]	ሊ [i]	ላ [a]	ሌ [e]	ል []    	ሎ [o]
Proposal	e (or o)	ū    	ī    	ā    	ē    	i (or u)	ō
ዮም (Yom) | contribs • Talk 03:13, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: My original proposal included allowing o and u optionally as the rounded allophones of e and i, respectively. yhever 11:46, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry, I forgot to add that; I added it now. — ዮም (Yom) | contribs • Talk 15:07, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

text: I assume it will be OK to modify this for other ES languages.  For example, in Tigre the 1st and 4th vowels differ mainly in length, and Raz uses a for the 1st.  Leslau does the same for Ge'ez in his concise dictionary (1: a, 4: ā). And Silt'e has the 5 short and 5 long vowels borrowed from Cushitic, with short a filling the 1st order position.  — MikeG (talk) 03:45, 16 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, for tigre, anything but a and ā for 1st and 4th, respectively, would be less than desirable. The same goes for Ge'ez. Also, Shin/sin (Ge'ez Sawt) will have to be distinguished from Sat. The former represents both š and s (with the shift being š->s; cp. USBGN negash and nigus); this is a consonantal issue, but we obviously can't apply these vowels to all Ethiosemitic languages (Gurage languages all have 10 vowels, don't they?). The Gurage languages should be relatively simple using the letters aeiou for short (those are their vowels, right?), and with lines over them (āēīōū) for long). What about Harari/Haderé? Did it adopt/keep long [a:] from Arabic too (well, we're already using ā for all, but I mean is first order short a?)? I don't think this'll be too big of a problem, though. — ዮም (Yom) | contribs • Talk 05:00, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

text:  Northern Gurage (Soddo) and some Western Gurage (at least Chaha) have the familiar seven vowels of Amharic (more or less).  Eastern (Silt'e and I think Zway, though I'm not sure) have the Oromo vowels.  yhever should know about the other Gurage languages.  I'll check on Harari.  I know there are some long vowels.  yhever probably knows. In any case, I doubt there will be a problem. — MikeG (talk) 13:28, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

text:  It turns out that Z(w)ay has the same 5 short and 5 long vowels that Silt'e has (I found a great new book on Zay).  In addition to 1st order, Harari has long and short [a], so we could use e, a, and ā for these.  Inor (Ennemor) will be the hard one since (according to Berhanu and Hetzron's book), it has 8 short and 8 long vowels.  They argue the the long vowels are really double vowels, so we could represent them by doubling the short vowel symbol.  The short vowels include roughly the Amharic set plus /æ/, so I guess we could just use the symbol æ for this 8th vowel.  More complicated in Inor is the fact that vowels and some consonants (other than consonants that are already nasal) can be nasalized.  I guess we could use the standard tilde for this, but that might not work together with the macron.  Maybe we should worry about Inor when get to that article. — MikeG (talk) 02:25, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Vowels