RE: Persian Romanization
John, don't bore us with further iterations of the faults of Persian romanization, but rather fill us in on your exciting trip and truck fire! I hope you are safe and recovered.
JR
On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 14:40:47 -0800, John Eilts wrote:
> Peter,
> As one curmudgeon to another, I think you have a very strong point.
> And since the discussion has turned a bit to looking at the need
> for romanization at all in a user friendly catalog of manual or
> automated variety, I would rather put my efforts into getting us
> all into producing records to share with original script only, with
> the option for "romanization" or "transliteration" as needed for
> local purposes. But the point being that all descriptive elements
> should be according to the original AACR2 rule. John
>
> (Forgive me if I am a little incoherent. I have just returned from
> a trip driving a truck and trailer across this all too vast country
> with many adventures along the way and culminating with the truck
> bursting into flames at the destination--all goods were rescued!).
>
> At 07:19 AM 2/24/2005, you wrote:
>> Dear Colleagues over the Water,
>>
>> I have read the correspondence on the question of Romanisation of
>> Persian with interest but I did not consider it my place to
>> interfere from the perspective of a different country.
>>
>> However the following item begins to sound some warning bells to
>> me in case some sort of consensus of US Middle Eastern librarians
>> emerges that might bring influence to bear to alter LC
>> Romanization tables in directions I do not like.
>>
>> "(2) The recent discussion of Persian romanization and the place
>> of vernacular
>> scripts in OPACS makes me wonder whether we need to have a
>> Committee on Technical Services (or maybe just "Cataloging") to
>> pull together the threads and work with the ALA CCS CCAAM rep.
>> (currently, John) and listserv owner for
>> the Middle East cataloging group and the Arabic/Persian
>> Cataloging Manual folks at Princeton on problems in this area."
>>
>> I hope you will not mind if I put forward a British (though
>> personal) contribution to the debate.
>>
>> I have to declare an interest here. One of the achievements of
>> MELCOM UK has been to get all the British libraries to drop their
>> various transliteration systems for Arabic and Persian and for
>> them all to conform to LC's Romanization tables. I consider this
>> to be an achievement and it has facilitated immeasurably the
>> exchange of cataloguing records between libraries. I do not think
>> any of the British academic institutions would view with favour
>> the idea of altering either transliteration table.
>>
>> I also have to declare a prejudice owing to the fact that I first
>> acquired my Persian in Kabul. Now in Kabul people do not
>> pronounce the word transliterated according to LC tables as
>> khanah as khoone, nor the word transliterated as "muhaqqiq" as
>> "mohaghghegh". In fact the Kabuli pronunciation conforms much
>> more closely to LC than to Tehrani pronunciation, even down to
>> the izafa (ezafe) which is pronounced more closely to i than to e.
>>
>> I would rather not get into a long and ultimately sterile
>> discussion on the relevant merits of transliteration tables. They
>> are all purely conventions, and all equally absurd to the extent
>> that people have had to use them to mediate between readers of a
>> language and the materials in that language the readers are
>> looking for.
>>
>> However I am afraid that despite the great new possibilities
>> brought about by Unicode it is likely to be a long time over here
>> before it will be possible to dispense with romanization.
>>
>> I would then just like to put in a little plea to leave the
>> tables as they are.
>>
>> Best wishes from a cockney curmudgeon,
>>
>> Peter Colvin
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