#Romanization

[apttalbalik]

[or-what-you-will]

What is a "daroga"?

In the late 19th century, Persian orthography was not yet standardized, and there was no standard romanization from the Persian alphabet to languages that use roman characters like French or English. When Leroux wrote Phantom, he would have had to make up his own romanization of the word داروغه based on the sounds in the word or use one from an existing dictionary.

This means that when you google the term “daroga” today, it’s often difficult to find more information about it, and often what does come up is about India or Mongolia. The word did come from Mongolian, but it was also very much used in the Persian empire. Today, there are different ways of spelling the word that better reflect the pronunciation in Persian. On top of this, romanizations often differ depending on which language you are using the word in, as different languages pronounce vowels differently.

An example from a Persian-French dictionary from the late 1800s romanizing and translating “daroga” into French. In English, the romanizations “darugha” and “darougheh” are a bit more common today when referencing "daroga" in the context of Persia or Iran. These romanizations help keep the vowel sound for و as “oo” rather than “oh” which is closer to its proper pronunciation.

IPA: [d̪ɒːɾuːˈɣe]

They functioned as more than just the chief of police. Depending on the city and time period, their roles varied. They were in charge of managing the bazaar (central market), catching thieves and punishing them, making sure that the vendors didn’t sell illegal goods, in some cases also levying taxes, and serving as a sort of mayoral figure. They also managed guards who would keep watch over palaces and the bazaar at night.

By the time the Qajar era came around (1789-1925), the role of “daroga” was greatly diminished. They had reputations for being corrupt and collecting money for their own benefits, and a lot of their duties were distributed among other officials. At the end of the 19th century, they were pretty much obsolete, as the shah sought to modernize, and eventually created a more westernized police force to replace the old system.

You can find more information in the following places:

Fiveable - a short list of basic facts

Encyclopaedia Iranica - in depth exploration of the organization of Persian cities throughout history (this site is a high quality resource for finding information on the history of Persia in English)

Sheriff`s position in Qajar era (1796-1896) - academic article discussing the role of the "daroga" in the Qajar era specifically (article in Persian only)

[binnybinnychickendinny]

i actually think daily about the fleury/binner almost-fight bc. okay so obviously the consensus among every nhl fan ever is that they should've been allowed to fight right lmao. but what i think most people do not realize is that allegedly the fight was planned. from before the game even started. because binner and fleury have a friend or trainer in common or something? and binner knew getting into a fight was on fleury's bucket list and he was like "sure man i'll get into it with you if there's an opportunity" and then he saw fleury skating down the ice and was like "oh yeah okay let's go" and then the refs wouldn't let them. like everyone looks at it as "oh just jordan binnington being jordan binnington and fleury was going to kill him about it" and there's definitely a LITTLE of that but they also both wanted to get into a fight just for the hell of it LMAO. i totally understand why fleury didn't share that with the reporters immediately afterwards (and neither did binner, this is from an interview he did that i assume most people have not seen) but it is funny to me that the surrounding context is less "binnington being insane and fleury being the saint that he is deciding to fight him in that moment" and more "binnington being completely willing from the start to get into a homoerotic goalie fight just bc fleury wants to"

[auw-0rr]

After dropping my Art hot takes, it's time to drop my romanization hot takes!

1: don't use h+l/r/any nasal or sonorant to indicate voiceless variants. Y'all have no idea how ugly that looks. Like genuinely who's going to come here and tell me with a straight face that using "ahna" is better than "anha" to write /a.n̥a/??

And idc if Portuguese people use nh to make /ɲ/. We have other cool things for /ɲ/.

2: anything other than 'eu' to romanize 'ɯ' is pure, raw, unchecked sin. I don't need explaining, there's a reason people use eu, it looks cool asf and nothing will ever compare.

3: stop using English coded symbols. Why use ch, sh, zh and dzh when you have č, š, ž and dž,? Why use y to indicate palatalization when you have 'i' or 'j', or even just a diacritic? Or using 'kh' for /x/ when you could use j, ch, h, x, ç, literally anything else? The world of letters is filled with options and people somehow think using shi like 'zh' is acceptable.

...yeh I think I'm done here

[haxyr3]

Is there a difference between Dmitri and Dmitry?

It is simply two different ways to transliterate the same male name that is actually Дмитрий in Russian. The transliteration of Russian text from the Cyrillic script into the Latin script is called Romanization. And there are many different international standards for that - here you can learn more about it.

If you write academic papers and have to cite Russian sources, this website will help you to transliterate names and book titles correctly according to your selected standard (normally, for the USA and Canada, it is the American Library Association (ALA) and the Library of Congress (LC) standard)

[sakurablossomsagain]

🩷MOA, quiero compartir este video que hice de Over The Moon con el Our Sanctuary Video Version de TXT!!

🎙️Es la letra en Hangeul, Romanización y Traducción al español:

[squeakygeeky]

My brain is going whirr whirr whirr so here’s a random lesson/unhinged rant on romanization. What is romanization? It means using the letters of the Latin alphabet (in this case I really mean the English alphabet) to represent a different script. Obviously I’ll be talking here about how we represent the Thai script (which I know is technically an abugida not an alphabet, don’t @ me). The way I see it, there’s two basic reasons to do this.

To make the word more pronounceable/memorable/understandable for people who speak languages that use the Latin alphabet. For example you’re a learner who doesn’t know the Thai alphabet 100% yet and you want to make notes on a word you just learned. Or you’re putting up signs for tourists, where it doesn’t really matter if they can pronounce the name of the place properly as long as it matches what’s in their guidebook.

Technical limitations. For example, someone from a country with a different writing system has to fill out their name in a form that only accepts latin letters. Or maybe you want to message a friend in Thai over in-game chat but it doesn’t support Thai. Or maybe you could theoretically be typing in Thai but you have a US keyboard so it’s just easier to turn to romanization instead.

One thing relevant to me, and probably anyone reading this is the romanization of character names. I see it as a combo of 1 and 2. Obviously the audience needs a memorable way to think of the character and also it would be bizarre to randomly switch into Thai in the middle of the English subs, if the software even lets you do that.

There are two basic categories of romanization. Transcription is where you use the Roman alphabet to represent the sounds of thai, and transliteration where you basically just substitute English letters for Thai ones. The big difference between the two is going to be with ending consonants, since there are different pronunciation rules for initial consonants than for when that letter is the final consonant of a syllable.

THERE IS NO STANDARD SYSTEM FOR ROMANIZING THAI

Okay, well there is the Royal Thai General System of Transcription (RTGS), and it is official, but even the government doesn’t use it consistently and also I hate it, which is what really matters. It’s terrible for English-speaking learners because a lot of choices are misleading. Think of all the people who cannot pronounce ‘Phuket’ because in English ‘ph’ is ‘f’ but in RTGS it’s an aspirated ‘p’ (so to me just a normal ‘p’). This would be okay though if you gained a basic familiarity with how RTGS worked, or just looked up a chart or something. Much worse is the fact that the combination of letters ‘ch’ are used to represent two completely different sounds in Thai. Part of me wishes translators would always use RTGS so we could have consistent subs, but then I remember it’s terrible and most Thais do not use it for their names in reality. The good thing about RTGS is that since it doesn’t use any diacritic markers or other non-Latin characters it’s useful when technical limitations are the issue.

Most materials for learners will use some form of transcription, but this will vary wildly. I had my own personal system at one point, but didn’t end up using it much because I stopped taking notes and switched to listening only. However, now I'm all about the Thai alphabet.

There are downsides to transcription. One is that many sounds in Thai simply do not exist in English, so any attempt to transcribe fundamentally won't allow an English speaker to intuitively pronounce it correctly. Another is that the pronunciation of the same word can vary, which you’ll see a lot with any word containing ‘ร’. Formally (or sarcastically), this will be a rolled ‘r,’ but normally people pronounce it ‘l’ (if it’s pronounced at all, in consonant clusters people just drop it and they also tend to drop actual ‘l’ sounds in clusters). So of course it makes sense to be written ‘r,’ but it’s not going to sound like that most of the time, so is that really transcription at all? Also our own letters don’t actually correspond to specific sounds in English, so English is a fundamentally terrible language to try to transliterate things into?

The advantage of transcription, where you just swap a Thai letter for an English one, is that it’s very easy for someone who is Thai. They can just spell the word in Thai in their head and make the substitution, no worries about how it actually sounds. I don’t mind transcription at this point, since I am starting to get the hang of final consonants, and in some cases it helps me guess at the Thai spelling of the word. Buttttt it’s not actually that helpful for that since there are lots of cases where multiple Thai letters make the same sound.

Whatever you’re doing, you have to wrestle with the fact that Thai has tones, so if you’re not representing the tones somehow, you definitely won’t be able to pronounce a word properly based on its romanization. And if you’re using romanization for reason 2, technicla limitations, it may be literally impossible to represent tones. RTGS doesn’t bother with tones. Or vowel length. So that’s great.

If you want to actually learn to pronounce a word in Thai and don’t know the Thai script, your best bet is IPA. The International Phonetic Alphabet is a standard way to represent sounds, so it’s super useful…if you know IPA. Or if you want to look through some charts and listen to some audio files to learn how to pronounce one specific thing. It’s not useful for resolving technical limitations because it uses lots of symbols not in the Latin alphabet. And unless you want to be a polyglot, why waste time learning IPA when you could just learn the Thai script? Also it doesn’t do tones.

Here’s a website where you can plug in any thai text and get a transcription, including in IPA. There are many options. If you do it with a character’s name, you can try those options and it’s totally possible none of those will match what you see in the subs because the actual human is using transliteration/their own random system that is not one of the things listed/there's a canon romanization of the character's name. But also because sometimes it's just wrong. Have fun.

For more resources on pronouncing Thai I recommend Stuart Jay Raj. His way of talking about things takes some getting used to, but his ‘indic compass’ is actually pretty useful. If you set it to show Thai, you can click on a letter to hear it and see how it’s supposed to be made in the mouth. I also like his video on vowels.

For more on Thai names, see @recentadultburnout’s posts on Thai name meanings.

Because I’m currently obsessed with Century of Love, the rest of this is using the two actors, Daou and Offroad, as examples:

Did you know that Daou’s name had two syllables? My mind was blown when I heard it.

Thai: ต้าห์อู๋ IPA: tâː ʔǔː RTGS: tau The way I would write it for myself: dta-oo

Absolutely no way I was getting that from reading 'Daou.' That first letter is an unaspirated, unvocalized alveolar consonant, and I know what that means because despite not being great at IPA, I am pretty obsessed with how in the mouth sounds are made. Basically it’s like ‘d’ or ‘t’ without actually being either of them. ต้า is the first syllable and ห์อู๋ is the second, but this is not a reading lesson, let's move on.

Offroad’s name is literally the English word ‘off-road’ like a jeep. In Thai script it’s ออฟโรด (not just his name, also when discussing motor vehicles). The site gets this one 'wrong,' putting an 'f' when that's not what 'ฟ' does as a final consonant, but closer to actual English word, so I used charts for this.

Thai: ออฟโรด IPA: ʔɔ̀ːp rôːt RTGS: oprot

There’s no ‘f’ ending sound in Thai, and consonants are always unvoiced and unreleased. If you read my Wat/Wad post, I said 'ด' as a final consonant makes a ‘t’ sound, but I really meant it’s the weird ‘dt’ sound. So lots of people pronounce his name something more like ‘awploadt.’ I kept thinking people were calling him ‘upload’ until I actually thought it through.

Feel free to send your burning questions about pronunciation/spelling, though I’m definitely not advanced enough to be confident recording myself saying anything.

[conlangery]

Romanization Refactor for Draconic

I've been a little bit unsatisfied with the romanization for Draconic/Ndăkaga for a bit, and decided to adjust some of the values. It looked generally good, but some characters were more difficult to type and might not be familiar to less linguistically-sophisticated readers. As a result, I've changed the following mappings:

1. /ə/ changed from <ə> to <ă>. <ă> is used for the schwa in Romanian, so it's not unprecedented.

2. Following the above change, /ɪ ɛ/ have been changed from <î ê> to <ĭ ĕ>. This establishes the breve as bringing a sound closer to mid-central. Although we did decide on <î> in a stream vote, <ĭ> was not an option in that vote, so I feel more comfortable changing it. It also leaves the caret diacritic alone, which will be useful if I have to use it in other languages (say for tone).

3. /ŋ/ will change from <ŋ> to <ng>. This does mean that I will have <ngg> sequences occuring, but I feel it worth it so I don't have to switch keyboards and because captial <Ŋ> can be inconsistent.

4. /ʔ/ will change from <ʻ> (ʻokina) to <'> (apostrophe). ʻokina looks nicer, but it's just simpler to type an apostrophe. I would have to either copy-paste, set my language to Hawaiian, or do a custom keyboard layout to keep ʻokina.

These changes should make the orthography more intuitive, and everything on here is typable with SIL's EuroLatin keyboard, meaning I don't have any copy-pasting or keyboard switching to do while typing in Ndăkaga.

[paizau]

I'm changing the romanization of Ngįout becasue I made the velars more normal, so now I have /k g x ɣ/ instead of /k g x/ with a weird distribution, and now I have no reason to keep romanizing them as <q/kk, g/k, k> and I can just have <k/kk, g/k, x/xx, gh> so on the one hand yay! woohoo! but on the other hand I now have to go through my dictionary and document and update everything so oh no :(

/kɛx.xɛp/ <qekep> => <kexxep>

/xʌ̃/ <kǫ̈> => <xǫ̈>

[ashleyrowanthewriter]

Yay! I have finally evolved a conlang with a nice, but wonky orthography!

Now, since there are two letters pronounced as /u/ is it justified romanizing one as u and the other one ů, since that one /u/ shifted from /o/?

I already know that it won't be one to one with the spelling due to how stress marking works.

[apttalbalik]

[thelinguistthing]

Romanization poll

* (Especially for tone contour and sounds/phonemes that cant be described with the latin alphabet)

[binnybinnychickendinny]

anyone want to talk about cycle of abuse narratives in hockey in the form of players becoming the general managers that split people up and send them away from their friends and care about the money and the legacy more than anything when it used to just be about the game to them as well. anyone. is this thing on

[canonical-transformation]

Okay, time to introduce a disaster of a tagging convention. Just like Wade-Giles, the apostrophes are mostly there for flavour.

[jovialbasementbouquetblr]

China-Russia: Histories of 'Spelling' (pinyin) of Chinese in Russia and China

After reading some excellent contributions on Quora about the current (there are quite a few others with their own pluses and minuses) PRC official method of ‘spelling sounds’ pinyin Mandarin pronunciation, I found the article translated below about the development of methods spelling Chinese for Russian students of China including towards the end of some discussions between Mao and Stalin about…