Roman-letter Spelling of Toponyms from other Wrfting Systems

"Pages 400-403 of Proceedings and TransactLons of the Third International Congress of Toponymy and Anthroponymy louvain- InternatLonal Center of Onomaetice"

John G. mtziger

United States Department of the Interior

Board on Geographic Names July 1949 Roman-letter spelling of toponyms from other writing systems

The number of toponyms from areas where non-Roman writing systems are used runs into the millions and tens of millions. In fact, for a name authority like the Uhited States Board on Geographic Nsmes, such toponyms represent a major and vital problem. The cyrillic Slavic area, Greece, the Arabic-Persian area, the whole of Asia and large 8ttStCheS of Africa and the islanda of the Pacific with millions of place names must all be handled by workable and Consistent procedures for spellings in terms of the Roman alphabet.

Toponyms from non-Roman alphabets are written in either alphabetic or nonalphabetic writing systems. There must be worked out for each non- alphabetic writing system a transcription system by whi&-I mean one-to- one substitution of Roman letter symbolq for distinctive $ounds or ranges of .sounds, that is, phonemes. ‘For non-Roman alphabets, although transcrip- tion systems can be elaborated, the preference is for transliteration systems, by which 'I mean one-to-one substitution of Roman-letter smbols for non-Roman letter8 (graphemes). Thus, in transcription one deals with sound units, in transliteration with written symbols. In deciding whether to transcribe or to.transliterate toponyms written in a given non-Roman alphabet, the l3owd evaluat& each alphabet from the point of view of its efficiency as a writing system' for the : language concerned.

If the alphabet offers, on the whole, a good analysis of the sound of the language or langukges concerned, as is the case with the various cyrillic alphabets and the Greek, Arabic, Persian anb' Amharic alphabets, a transliteration system is worked out. Sf on'the other hand, a given.alphabet-is poor in represent- the tiound8 af the language'con- cerned, in that it does not distinguish distinctive sounds as is true. of the Mongolian and Tibetan alphabetst or is marked by the inclusion of eymbois for phoc: : details no longer present in the-language, as with the Tibetan alphabet, a transcription system, rather than a transliteration system, is used, '..

Prom the standpoint of the United States Board on Gaographic Names there are general principles to be followed in elaborating a trans- cription or transliteration system or in evaluating one for adoption. One and one only, Roman-iletter symbol or combination of symbols should be used for a given sound or letter in a transcription or transliteration system and not morethan one sound or letter should be represented by a given Roman-letter symbol. For transcription systems this requires an accurate linguistic analysis of the sounds and ranges of dist fnct ive sounds (phonemes), tones, accent patterns and other significant phenomena of a language before a transcription system can be drawn up. For transliteration systems there is required an arrange- ment of the letters of the alphabet concerned over against Roman-letter symbols in a manner such that the Roman-letter equivalents for sounds would be those that the user of the transliterated name would naturally expect. For the use of English-speaking countries, at least, only after the Roman--letter etock ts exhausted should one resort to the use of diacritical marks or modified letters.

Transcription should not be combined with transliteration. Only confusion would result from the mixture of graphLc and phonemic substi- tutive symbolisation, since transcription is the process of substituting (in the Roman-alphabet areas) Roman-letter symbols for the sounds of a given language, whereas transliteration is not concerned in the strictest sense with sounds, but with Roman-letter equivalents of non-Roman letters. Combination of transcription with transliteration and vice versa leads to the temptation of leveling out sound distinctions which do not exist in the language of the transcriber. A notable example would be, in a transliteration system for Arabic, transliterating the Arabic velarized (usually called emphatic) consonant 81, the same as the nonvelarized consonant hH, and sgta the same as sin, $3 the same as t%i, +d the.same as dH1 and @3 the same as sZf, Nor should be long-short vowel distinc- tions of languages like Arabic, Amharic or Mongolian be neglected cn a transcription or transliteration system because they do not occur in the transliteratorvs language.

Automatic,or non-distinctive sound features like the fixed initial syllable accents fn Wngolfan should be disregarded in transcription systems, They need not be marked in the transcriptions themselves because their occurrence can be defined for the users of toponyms in general explanations of pronunciation. Likewise, graphic symbols of non-Roman alphabets can be disregarded in transliteration where they are automati- cally replaceable in transi'iteration, as initfal hamza fn Arabic, or the smooth breathing in Creek; Morphophonemic symbols (symbols whLch repre- sent now one, now another sound, depending on the phonetic envir&mentj, can be resolved into Roman-letter symbols for the sounds they represent. Thus the l&n of the Arabic definite article can be assimilated to the initial lxer of the following word in keeping with the morphophonem&z rules of Arabic, or the 2 in Russian-cyrillic can be transliterated as y= and not 2 initially, after vowels, and after the &o-called hard and soft signs.

-2 For transcription and transliteration systems to be used in writing the place names of an area in Roman letters one should deal with complexes of toponyms area by area. The sound system for the main or nationally official language or dialect of an area should be the basis of transcription and divergent dialects should be disregarded. Other- wise the management of a toponymic program is likely to become very complex because then a number of sound systems must be analyzed instead of only one and moreover the problem of dialect boundaries, which is often exceedingly difficult, must be worked out. An example is the situation in China, where a satisfactory treatment of the Chinese names in China is possible in terms of the pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese, which is understood throughout most of China, whereas, a policy of treating China by differentiating Mandarin, Wu, Hakka and Cantonese, to 8ay nothing of subdialects,' would at present at least, be of insuperable difficulty. Similarly, the'transliteration of a non-Roman alphabet by different systems according to the pronunciation of local dialect8 pre- supposes accurate knowledge of local pronunciation which is, strictly speaking, not the concern of transliteration. Since United States Board on Geographic Names transcription and transliteration systems must strike a balance between scientific accuracy and intelligibility for the general public of the Uhited States, diacrit- ical marks and modified letters are kept to a minimum. Some linguistic features totally foreign to European languages, such as the tones of the sine-Tibetan-Burmese ianguages, must De sacriricea, wnen tney are completely incomprehensible to the user in the United States, or whail their presence or even their nature cannot be determtned with any accuracy at the present state of our knowledge.

May I in conclusion cite an example of how a problem in trans- cription was solved in the Board's work. A few years ago the Hoard wa8 faced with the problem of bringing order out of chaos with respect to the place names of Mongolia. Hitherto Mongolian place names had appeared on Roman-alphabet maps and other sources in a hodge-podge of Rnglish- language spellings and transcriptions from Chinese, Japanese, Russian and ~'other spellings, Some names appeared in the sources written in terms of modern spoken Mongolian, others in term8 of literary BBngolian which bears roughly as much resemblance to spoken Mongolian a8 Latin to modern Italian. Dr. George L. Trager, then on the Hoard's staff, analysed the structure of modern spoken Halha Mongolian, the principal dialect, by analyzing existing phonetic and morphological descriptions, especially those of Vladimirtsev and Poppe. Even though Mongolian informant8 were not then available, Trager arrived at a phonemic notation for Halha Mongolian, which he and I later published in the Journal of American Oriental Society, vol. 67, No. 3, July to September, 1947,

3 under the title: The Lfnguistfc Structu_rc of Monp,sf,ian*-P-y__-. Place Names. Under the direction of Dr. Trager and myself a Mongolian-ExlglLsh dic- tionary was worked out on the basis of- A, V, Burdukov's Russian- Elongolian Dictionary o.E the Spoken Languah[Leningrad 19351 and with the aid of V, A. Kazakevich's excellent Modern Mongolian Toponyuics [Leningrad 193410 Then with the aid of the dictionary the meanfngs of thousands of Mongolian place names, which are almost always made up of meaningful descriptive phrases, were determined by comparison of the Russian, Chtnese, Japanese and other variants. Then the toponyms were respelled in the phonemic notation for Halha Mongolian. By this method r(-- - -_-_.. b-=tOp-~y~y vLI -&rqoiiai, at a comprehenslve map scale, was rendered consistently, in terms of one spelling system rather than haphazardly, depending on the vagarfes of all sorts of sources. The reliabIP5ty of the Board"s spelling system for Mongolian is indicated by the tentative results of an analysis. of E(bngolian now being made in the United States by modern linguistics methods, using native speakers as informants. Many problems fa the Roman-letter spelling of toponyms from non-Roman writing systems still remain unsolved. The number of areas fog which as yet sufficient geographical and linguistic source materials are unavaLlable is still larger than one would desire. Such matters as the scarcity of Arabic and Persian toponyms in Arabic script complete with vowel points, and the great variation in the geographic and topo- nym8e data for many sreas throughout the world present perplexing prob- lems. liowever, progress is being made and better results are continually being achieved through the application of toponymic principles to the problem of spellfng the place names of the world in Roman letters,