From lingua at geez.org  Thu Mar  2 10:27:29 2006
From: lingua at geez.org (Daniel Yacob)
Date: Thu Mar  2 10:29:06 2006
Subject: [am-nlp] Draft Transliteration Standard for Review
Message-ID: <E1FEqeH-0008D0-Pj@zendro.geez.org>

Greetings All,

I hope the year is off to a good start for everyone, it is busy at this
end as ever, still trying to catch up in a number of areas.  One has been
to prepare a propsal for an Ethiopic transliteration standard.  An early
draft was presented at an ISO meeting at the start of February, mostly
for the awareness of stakeholders there.  The proposal can advance for
voting at the next meeting (I think in 6 months time).

People interested in reviewing and commenting on the propsoal can find
it at the NLP site.  Look under the "Resources" folder and then "Drafts"
to find the documents, you will need to be a site member to access them.
The Ethiopianists crowd at the University of Hamburg will be reviewing
the proposal this month as well.  Following their input it will open
for review to full public review.

The proposal presents three transliteration systems, one is for "IPA"
which can only be approximate as per the nature of phonetics and language,
and is intended more as a guide.  The next is "Latin" which is much needed
in the humanities, here non-ASCII symbols are permissible, then there is
an ASCII transliteration system which is the most restrictive.

The main departure from SERA in the last system is that the ISO
transliteration must be case insensitive.  Which disqualifies much of
SERA.  The proposed system then is more a combination of SERA and Ethiop
while trying to follow the norms for Semetic script transliterations.  All
three systems (IPA, Latin, ASCII) are kept in sync as much as possible.

I regret not making this post sooner.  There is a 2nd proposal that I
had wished to present at the same time since it is useful to consider
the two together.  But then February came and went and the other still
needs some work -perhaps in another week or two.

In other news, the lexicon work that I'm involved with is still progressing,
a correction is back on track this week, here I also want to wait and
present the work as a collection -I expect now in April.

thank you,

/Daniel