Questions tagged [transliteration]
Representation of text originally recorded in one writing system in a different writing system.
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Should I capitalize a quoted transliteration?
Consider the following:
"Saranghe" not only means "I love you," but it also means "Let's be together till we die."
In Telugu, "Intiki veltunnava?" means "...
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Why is Julia in cyrillic regularly transcribed as Yulia in English?
Julius Caesar's name is spelled with J both in Latin and in English. So is Julia the Elder. There are plenty of examples of Julia in English, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia
I think this ...
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Why are some Russian names Anglicised but not others?
For example, we speak of "Peter" the Great, "Nicholas" II, and "Joseph" Stalin, but no one ever spoke of "George" Gagarin, "Theodore" Dostoevsky, or &...
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How should I spell Zelensky?
Recently, Volodymyr Zelensky (for this question, I will use the shorter version of his name), the president of Ukraine, has been in the news frequently due to the war in his country.
However, news ...
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Should the first h in Nehemiah be silent? If so, why?
I hear many native speakers do not pronounce the first h in Nehemiah. However, I also found a video pronouncing this h. I am wondering about the correct pronunciation of Nehemiah in English.
This ...
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Enforce NOT to pronounce sh in a word [closed]
I have a word in the Arabic language that is transliterated into Mushib in English. It means Verbose. I need to enforce the pronunciation of this word to be Mus-Hib (Without pronouncing the sh sound)
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English possessive for a name that ends in an apostrophe (in this case, in transliterated Ukrainian)?
I am an editor editing a book review, and I'm not sure how to deal with this:
Serhii Bilokin’’s book
The author has chosen to transliterate with the apostrophe at the end of the name, but it looks ...
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Chinese names in English [closed]
I have noticed certain Chinese names follow the English order, i.e., given name before family name, when occurring in English text, whereas others retain the Chinese order, i.e., family name before ...
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I am trying to find out if there is a convention of correctness for writing Arabic proper nouns starting with 'Al'
The news channel 'Al Jazeera' writes its name like I have i.e with a space between 'Al' and 'Jazeera', in text but in the logo it is 'ALJAZEERA'. One come across variations like 'Alqaeda', 'Al-Qaeda', ...
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Making a name an English name
How does one go about taking a name (or word) from another language and making it an English name? I know of examples such as Yeshua being turned to Joshua or Yonatan turning into Jonathan, but I do ...
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Is that an "r" in "worship" in a text from 1591?
I was trying to see how the Spanish word merced was translated into English in the 16th century, when I found this entry in a dictionary from 1591 by Richard Percyvall:
I understand that the second ...
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How to write name 'Jonas' to force /j/ sound?
In Poland and many European countries Jonas is a popular name, spelled slightly differently in each language (Jonasz, Jonàs, Jonáš, Joonas). In most of Europe and Africa it is pronounced with initial /...
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Terminal "f" versus "ff" in anglicized Russian surnames
Today, foreign names are anglicized more or less systematically from their original spelling: the Russian surname "Петров" generally becomes "Petrov", not the calqued "Peterson" or the more phonetic "...
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How to translate my name [closed]
I have seen many types of translation/transliteration of my Russian first and last names to English by different people. At the current moment I don't know what to choose when I want to introduce ...
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Why is J often used to represent a "Y" sound in Romanizations of other writing systems?
I am not referring to IPA. I am referring to examples in textbooks. For example, my Ukrainian textbook says that the letter Я is pronounced as "ja". Most native English speakers would pronounced this ...
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How to write my Korean name in academic publications? [closed]
I am a graduate student in Korea.
I would like to know how to write my name in formal, in particular, in IEEE paper.
Almost all names of Korean are with three letters. Each letter can be read with one ...
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How would one spell θæn?
My four-year-old recently got a pet frog. When he named it, he said, "θæn" (note: that is IPA, "θæn" sounds just like the word "than" but it has an unvoiced first consonant). I'm not sure how to ...
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Name of languages that don't use English characters?
I'm trying to name a question of mine:
I'm translating English to Hindi, what's it called when the translations are with English characters?
And instead of naming it: I'm translating English ...
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Why is the transliteration of names so strange at the beginning of Genesis?
Many names in the Old Testament are transliterated and used today. The names from later books -- such as Jonathan (Yonatan), Samuel (Shemu'el), and Joshua (Yehoshu'a) -- all seem to follow basic rules ...
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What is a "tony shop"? [closed]
This appears to be an uncommon phrase. Google returns nothing. Perhaps it's a foreign transliteration. Here is the excerpt:
The notice posted on Thursday said the embassy had received “information ...
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How does this word sound to English-speakers? [closed]
I want to name my project with a word from Ukrainian language. Transliterating it would be spelled as Ostriv.
And I'd like to be sure that it doesn't sound bad for English-speakers or isn't hard to ...
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Is "fatah" an alternative spelling of "fatwa"?
I've occasionally seen "fatah" being used instead of "fatwa" to mean Islamic religious ruling. For example, from Fear and Loathing of Sharks in Western Australia by Paul Watson (in an article which ...
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Who decides how a foreign name should be transliterated and why do such transliterations change over the decades?
I would like to know how a transliteration of a foreign name becomes "the accepted version", and why the accepted version is sometimes replaced. I would also like to know why some transliterations ...
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Usage of kh in transliteration of Cyrillic, hebrew and others
I'm not a native english speaker and I'm sometimes baffled by the appearance of "kh" in Russian names and other words (for instance the russian lunar rover "Lunokhod"). In this case, the sensible ...
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Why was Zormpa changed to Zorba? [closed]
In the original Greek text, Alexis Zorba's surname was Ζορμπά [Zormpa]. Does anyone know why the name came to be transliterated, in the English translation, as Zorba?
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Cyrillic names in transliteration [closed]
I wonder, if there is any adequate and up-to-date guide on transliteration of Cyrillic names. All I have read seem rather inconsistent and confusing.
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Why are the same words translated differently into English depending on their meaning?
I've seen it several times before, but only have one example at hand right now. This Forbes article mentions Russia as country's name, but Rossiya as the bank's name, despite that these words are ...
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What is the difference between translation and transliteration [closed]
It's always intrigued me what the difference is between these two terms.
I can guess that translation is a contextual translation whereby the original foreign text is maintained with any language ...
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Where does the anglicisation "Ottoman" come from?
Wikipedia on Ottoman Empire gives its naming as coming from the Ottoman Turkish language, but on that very page, the name of the language is transliterated as Lisân-ı Osmânî. In Russian we call the ...
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Which one of “Andrey” or “Andrei” is the better romanization of the Russian name “Андрей” for English speakers?
Which of Andrey or Andrei is the preferred transliteration of the Russian name Андрей into the English alphabet?
I checked Wikipedia, but it gives both variants.
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Why "Koran" changed to "Quran"?
According to the article Quran or Koran?, in 2000, AP started to use Quran instead of the more familiar Koran.
Does anybody have information as to why this happened, and why newspapers today are ...
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Anglicize for Japanese
English speakers will change pronunciation and spelling of foreign words to make them easier to manage and we call this Anglicization. Japanese do this too, adding extra vowels to foreign words to ...
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Software for transcribing English phonetics
After asking this question and learning a lot of facts from comments I got there, I was wondering about the existence of software that transcribes English text into phonetics. I discovered sites such ...
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What is the role of the single quote sign in Hebrew transliteration? [closed]
What is the role of the single quote sign in transliterations?
I have the following example:
Malkat Sh'va in Modern Hebrew
(From Wikipedia Queen of Sheba Article)
What is the ' sign called in ...
user9243
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Anglicization from Hebrew
How should one transliterate the well-known Jewish Holiday that usually takes place in December (or late November)?
Hannukah
or
Chanukah
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Why do some non-English words become English words?
Why do some non-English words become English words even though there is already are English words meaning the same thing that are more universally understandable?
For example,
He received kudos ...
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If we say "Socrates", "Hippocrates", etc, why don't we say "Aristoteles"? Why "Aristotle"?
If Σωκράτης is transliterated as "Socrates", and Ἱπποκράτης is transliterated as "Hippocrates", and other Greek names ending with -ης are transliterated as ending with "-es", why isn't Ἀριστοτέλης ...
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How should foreign words (with foreign characters) be written in English text?
This question is not about italicisation or how to construct plurals. I wonder what are general guidelines for writing foreign words based on a Latin alphabet in English text. I know that, for ...
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