Transliteration - Challenges

Challenges

A simple example of difficulties in transliteration is the voiceless uvular plosive used in Arabic and other languages. It is pronounced approximately like English, except that the tongue makes contact not on the soft palate but on the uvula. Pronunciation varies between different languages, and different dialects of the same language. The consonant is sometimes transliterated into "g", sometimes "k", and sometimes "q" in English. Another example is the Russian letter "Х" (kha), pronounced similarly to the letter "j" in Spanish. It is pronounced as the voiceless velar fricative /x/, like the Scottish pronunciation of ⟨ch⟩ in "loch". This sound is not present in most forms of English, and is often transliterated as "kh", as in Nikita Khrushchev. Many languages have phonemic sounds, such as click consonants, which are quite unlike any phoneme in the language into which they are being transliterated.

Some languages and scripts present particular difficulties to transcribers. These are discussed on separate pages.

  • Ancient Near East
    • Transliterating cuneiform languages
    • Transliteration of ancient Egyptian (see also Egyptian hieroglyphs)
    • hieroglyphic Luwian
  • Armenian language
  • Avestan
  • Brahmic family
    • Devanagari: see Devanagari transliteration
    • Pali
    • Tocharian
    • Malayalam: see Romanization of Malayalam
  • Chinese language
    • transliteration into Chinese characters
    • romanization of Chinese
    • Cyrillization of Chinese
  • Click languages of Africa
    • Khoisan languages
    • Bantu languages
  • Greek language
    • Transliteration of Greek to the Latin Alphabet
    • Greek alphabet
    • List of Greek words with English derivatives
    • Linear B
    • Greeklish
  • Japanese language
    • Romanization of Japanese
    • Cyrillization of Japanese
  • Korean language
    • McCune-Reischauer
    • Revised Romanization of Korean
  • Persian language
    • Persian alphabet
      • Cyrillic alphabet
      • Romanization of Persian
      • Persian chat alphabet
  • Semitic languages
    • Ugaritic alphabet
    • Hebrew alphabet
      • Romanization of Hebrew
    • Arabic alphabet
      • Romanization of Arabic
      • Arabic Chat Alphabet
  • Slavic languages written in the Cyrillic or Glagolitic alphabets
    • Romanization of Belarusian
    • Romanization of Bulgarian
    • Romanization of Russian
    • Romanization of Macedonian
    • Romanization of Serbian
    • Romanization of Ukrainian
    • Volapuk encoding
  • Thai language
    • Royal Thai General System of Transcription
    • ISO 11940

Read more about this topic:  Transliteration

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