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In a strict linguistic sense, ''transcription'' is the process of matching the sounds of human speech to special written symbols using a set of exact rules, so that these sounds can be reproduced later. Transcription as a mapping from sound to script must be distinguished from Transliteration , which creates a mapping from one script to another that is designed to match the original script as directly as possible. Standard transcription schemes for linguistic purposes include the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), and its ASCII equivalent, SAMPA . As to the practical transcription, one can see numerous examples of it on the Common Phrases In Different Languages page (in this particular case, using the standard English spelling rules). See also Phonetic Transcription Transcription and transliteration are often mixed up due to a common journalistic practice of mixing elements of both in rendering foreign names. The resulting practical transcription is a hybrid called both transcription and transliteration by general public. In this table IPA is an example of Phonetic Transcription , followed by accepted hybrid forms in various languages. Note that 'Boris' is a transliteration rather than transcription in strict sense. The same words are likely to be transcribed differently under different systems. For example, the Mandarin Chinese name for the capital of the People's Republic Of China is ''Beijing'' in the commonly-used contemporary system Hanyu Pinyin , and in the historically significant Wade Giles system, it is written ''Pei-Ching''. Practical transcription can be done into a non-alphabetic language too. For example, in a Hong Kong Newspaper, George Bush 's name is transliterated into two Chinese Character s that sounds like "Bou-sū" (布殊) by using the characters that mean "cloth" and "special". Similarly, many words from English and other Western European languages are borrowed in Japanese and are transcribed using Katakana , one of the Japanese Syllabaries . See also Transcription Of Chinese , Transcription Of Russian . AFTER TRANSCRIBING After transcribing a word from one language to the script of another language:
This is especially evident for Greek loan words and proper names. Greek words are normally first transcribed to Latin (according to their old pronunciations), and then loaned into other languages, and finally the loan word has developed according to the rules of the goal language. For example, ''Aristotle'' is the currently used English form of the name of the philosopher whose name in Greek is spelled ̓Aριστoτέλης (''Aristotélēs''), which was transcribed to Latin ''Aristóteles'', from where it was loaned into other languages and followed their linguistic development.(In "classical" Greek of Aristotle's time, lower-case letters were not used, and the name was spelled ΑΡΙΣΤΟΤΕΛΗΣ.) ''Pliocene'' comes from the Greek words πλεîον (''pleîon'', "more") and καινóς (''kainós'', "new"), which were first transcribed (latinised) to ''plion'' and ''caenus'' and then loaned into other languages. The historising latinisation of <κ> by refers to the times where Latin pronounced <c> as {Link without Title} in all contexts. When this process continues over several languages, it may fail miserably in conveying the original pronunciation. One ancient example is the Sanskrit word ''dhyāna'' which transcribed into the Chinese word ''Ch'an'' through Buddhist scriptures. ''Ch'an'' (禪 Zen Buddhism) was transcribed from Japanese (ゼン ''zen'') to ''Zen'' in English. ''dhyāna'' to ''Zen'' is quite a change. Another complex problem is the subsequent change in "preferred" transcription. For instance, the word describing a philosophy or religion in China was popularized in English as Tao and given the termination '''-ism''' to produce an English word '''Taoism.''' That transcription reflects the Wade-Giles system. More recent Pinyin transliterations produce Dao and '''Daoism'''. (See also Daoism-Taoism Romanization Issue .) SEE ALSO |
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