One of the things that inevitably slows down my blog-posting is the fiddly and persnickety process of correctly transliterating non-Latin scripts. Hence, if you look at some of my past posts, you'll see I've transliterated titles of books and whatnot originally published in, say, Russian or Uzbek, into Latin.
I've now decided this not a helpful process ... both intellectually dishonest and - what with developments in OCR and the non-Latin script search capabilities of Google - no longer necessary on my part to transliterate or transcribe Cyrillic or Arabic-script titles and sources into Latin. As more and more libraries (mine own, IU, for example) are calibrating search functions for non-Latin scripts, it actually means we now no longer have to worry quite so much about how we transliterate the given title of a Russian or Persian work, since interested parties can now simply type the relevant text in the orginal scripts and let nature - I mean, teh interwebs - work it's magic.
2 comments:
an excellent decision. Your readers look forward to hearing more of your travails. Incidentally I recently read Maria Subtelny's "Scenes from the Literary Life of Timurid Herat," (thought it might be a good idea to catch up on my supervisor's research), and it contained some anecdotes about Mir 'Ali Shir Nava'i; he was quite the sharp tongued one!
You are brave. There are two things that prevent me from doing this:
1) Because of LTR/RTL issues, Arabo-Persian-Urdu script still messes up line spaces quite often.
2) For Urdu/Punjabi in particular, there are many readers who cannot read the Arabic-derived scripts (for instance, Indians who have learned Devanagari and Gurmukhi instead).
Aside from this I think that a nice, consistent system of transliteration can be both beautiful and a geeky pleasure.
Great blog! No doubt you know Paul Losensky. He is a very gracious man and a wonderful scholar.
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