Sinhala and transliteration queries

[graeco_celt]

Note for maintainers, before I forget: could we have a Sinhala tag, please? Thanks.

I've put a brief explanation of my reason for taking up Sinhala, under the LJ cut, so you can just skip to the actual questions if you like. However, reading it will probably give you a better idea of what level of learning I'm looking for right now.

Comments

[pne]

Note for maintainers, before I forget: could we have a Sinhala tag, please? Thanks.

Done.

[graeco_celt]

Thank you kindly.

[mameluke]

"Anyway, an example of the problem I'm having here is that my Lonely Planet book tells me that it is using ah to represent the [ʌ] sound in 'cup'. I've tried banging this into my head but then when I'm practising individual words and sentences, I keep suddenly realising that I've been pronouncing it as the [ɑː] in 'father'. It's really frustrating and I'm considering re-writing all of their examples in a notebook, writing this sound as uh instead of ah but I don't know if that would just be a lot of unnecessary work/make things more confusing etc."

This drives me nuts. Sometimes I look at the pronunciation guide at the back of these books just for funzies, but more often than not I'm more confused at their conventions. Just put it all in IPA, dammit!

[graeco_celt]

Yeah, I assume it's the whole 'making it look familiar and, therefore, less scary' idea but it's really frustrating!

My knowledge of the IPA is limited to one first year uni paper and I now keep forgetting what half the symbols represent. In addition, some of the symbols are unnecessarily confusion, as they're actual letters of the alphabet that represent other sounds in non-IPA.
However, it's still a heck of a lot more consistent than everyone using their own conventions!

[shanrina]

There are some Hindi transliteration errors that drive me crazy, like "burra" instead of "bada" (meaning "big"). I get why they do it because to someone who isn't familiar with Hindi "burra" would get you closer to the proper pronunciation of the word, but, frankly, if you're not familiar with Hindi or a similar language you won't be pronouncing the word right anyway (neither spelling will get you the right pronunciation because there's no way to tell from the transliteration that it's supposed to be kind of an "rda" sound, so they might as well use the standard one. "Burra" is also very close to the way most people would transliterate बुरा (I'd go with bura for that one, but I wouldn't be too surprised if someone just chose to put two r's in), which means bad. So when I see that transliteration in a book, the first thing I think is bad, not big. This is definitely not the worst transliteration I've seen in a book I was read, but it's definitely the one I hate the most

[muckefuck]

Personally I find that a feature rather than a bug. The fundamental problem with transcribing Chinese is that there really isn't much overlap between its sounds and the sounds of English. If you write "ch", an English-speaker will pronounced this [ʧ] and not [tʂʰ] or [ʨʰ] as it should be. A spelling like Qing forces you to stop and think carefully about what the correct pronunciation of the initial sound. That's not a bad thing for a learner to do.

[shanrina]

I'm not actually learning Chinese. I do think in that situation you're right, though. However, I'd say that a good transliteration system doesn't only work for students of a language but also for people who are just reading about another culture. This is where pinyin fails, as far as I'm concerned. It limits nonspeakers' abilities to talk about the places and people they read about and makes it harder to connect the sounds they hear when someone who does know how those proper nouns should be pronounced with the letters they're seeing on the page.

[muckefuck]

I would say that by those criteria there simply isn't a "good transliteration system" for Chinese. (And given how many attempts have been made to come up with one, that makes it quite likely that there will never be such a system.) Yale is the most user-friendly for English-speakers, IMHO, but it's still far from foolproof.

[raistlinsshadow]

For the second, I've just started taking Arabic and am already disagreeing with some of the transliterations that are used. I'm going ahead and using some funky combination of IPA and general-English-phonetics to redo them to make more sense; in short, I'm rewriting things that don't make sense, but only to the extent that it's actually necessary. If something still makes sense in what might be a poorly transliterated form, I'll leave it in an effort to not be even more neurotic than I already am. ;)

[graeco_celt]

Hmm, okay, thanks.

Honestly, the only thing that's bothering me at the moment is the above example, with ah, but it's REALLY bothering me!

I suppose writing things out is a good way to concentrate on them and get them stuck in my head, though, so I think I'll try re-writing things and see how I go.