2005年10月23日

Transliteration woes...

In typing up that translation of Ezekiel 37:1-14 I encountered the vast difficulty of formatting that entry and making use of transliteration (representing any language of the world in another script). Moveable-Type has some clear issues with unicode, and formatting non-standard roman text just isn't very easy. Not to mention, simple fonts like Times New Roman don't support a great number of unicode characters. Even a simple transliteration of a few diacritics is difficult on the computer.

I'm debating trying to come up with a new keyboard layout for myself so I can at least input these characters with ease.

Then an even greater debate: what style of transliteration do I choose? The traditional styles of semetic transliteration aren't entirely accurate for Tiberian Hebrew. I think the use of /o/ for qamatz qaton and /ə/ for vocal schwa are misleading. I'm not entirely sure a dual-pronunciation of qamatz or schwa are supported by the graphemes of Tiberian Hebrew. I'm very interested in taking a look at Babylonian and Palestinian Hebrew vocalization, I have a book on the way which should give me some better tools in this debate.

Do I go with tradition because its well known and understood? Do I make a vain attempt to base it off of IPA, even though the original pronunciation is uncertain?

I think transliteration of the Hebrew is important; it provides an interesting window into seeing how words are put together and reduces reliance upon the Hebrew script. The script is important, mind you, but the language isn't in the letters. Any system of transliteration can't, and perhaps shouldn't, capture all the meaning of the original. Why bother if it did? What it should show is a different view of the language, one unfettered by the traditional means of reading and writing. It may also be more convenient for certain issues, notably interlinear texts wherein the direction of both languages can be the same.

I'll have to investigate further. Till then, you get the best hodgepodge that I can muster with Unicode, though I suspect it won't follow the traditional system (as seen in Lambdin) as much as that which some of the articles I've been reading lately have been using.

Posted by at 11:33 | Comments (0)