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Place names, standardization and transliteration anomalies
Many members of this mailing list must have to deal with place names which
were not originally written in Latin script, or which are usually written in
an extended (accented) Latin script. Usually, fonts for these languages and
scripts are not available to the printers of maps and atlases, and may well
be unfamiliar to users of these publications.
You may well also be familiar with anomalies that arise in place-name
conventions in this context. I would be grateful for any information that you
can pass on to me about transliteration and transcription practices on maps
for place names in Europe and Asia.
I have some contacts at the Royal Geographical Society and at the Permanent
Committee for Geographic Names in London, who have also sent me copies of the
American Board for Geographic Names guidelines issued last year.
As the new chair of the International Organization for Standardization's
subcommittee ISO/TC46/SC2 (Conversion of Written Languages) and its British
Standards Institution counterpart (BSI/IDT/2/5), I want to ensure that the
needs of cartographers and map-users are represented as ISO/TC46/SC2 becomes
more active in providing transliteration and transcription practices for a
wide range of scripts over the next six years. It can be said that the
transliteration standards developed by ISO/TC46/SC2 have been relatively
little used, and there may be a need to take account of practices that are
used in different fields.
One frequent topic of interest to me is the use of diacritics or not.
Any information that subscribers to this list can send on this or other
matters, and on existing transliteration practices, how widely they are used,
and how these conventions have been arrived at, will be particularly welcome.
Considering that email and use of the Internet is increasingly important
issue, some of my recent development work has involved putting together a
suite of programs to enable easy transfer of multilingual data on the many
networks that will still only accept 7-bit (lower ASCII/ English-language)
data, to enable emails to be composed, sent and viewed in many languages and
scripts.
I have already done this for Indian languages, so that text written in ISCII
can be turned into 7-bit transliterated text, transmitted and re-read by the
recipient of email - using any ISCII or similar character set, once
configured - back in Indian script. Similar developments are being worked on
elsewhere.
It would also be useful to know what sort of place-name data gets exchanged
by cartographers and others in this field, and whether such developments may
also be of interest to them.
I look forward to hearing from you.
John Clews
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John Clews (Chair ISO/TC46/SC2 & BSI/IDT/2/5: Conversion of Written Langauges)
SESAME Computer Projects, 8 Avenue Road tel: +44 (0) 1423 888 432
Harrogate, HG2 7PG, United Kingdom email: [log in to unmask]
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