Transcription linguistics: Encyclopedia II - Transcription linguistics - After transcribing

Transcription linguistics - After transcribing

After transcribing a word from one language to the script of another language:

• one or both languages may develop further. The original correspondence between the sounds of the two languages may change, and so the pronunciation of the transcribed word develops in a different direction than the original pronunciation.
• the transcribed word may be adopted as a loan word in another language with the same script. This often leads to a different pronunciation and spelling than a direct transcription.

This is especially evident for Greek loan words and proper names. Greek words are normally first transcribed to Latin (according to their old pronunciations), and then loaned into other languages, and finally the loan word has developed according to the rules of the goal language. For example, Aristotle is the currently used English form of the name of the philosopher whose name in Greek is spelled  ̓Aριστoτέλης (Aristotélēs), which was transcribed to Latin Aristóteles, from where it was loaned into other languages and followed their linguistic development.(In "classical" Greek of Aristotle's time, lower-case letters were not used, and the name was spelled ΑΡΙΣΤΟΤΕΛΗΣ.)

Pliocene comes from the Greek words πλεῖov (pleîon, "more") and καιvóς (kainós, "new"), which were first transcribed (latinised) to plion and caenus and then loaned into other languages. The historising latinisation of <κ> by <c> refers to the times where Latin pronounced <c> as [k] in all contexts.

When this process continues over several languages, it may fail miserably in conveying the original pronunciation. One ancient example is the Sanskrit word dhyāna which transcribed into the Chinese word Ch'an through Buddhist scriptures. Ch'an (禪 Zen Buddhism) was transcribed from Japanese (ゼン zen) to Zen in English. dhyāna to Zen is quite a change.

Another complex problem is the subsequent change in "preferred" transcription. For instance, the word describing a philosophy or religion in China was popularized in English as Tao and given the termination -ism to produce an English word Taoism. That transcription reflects the Wade-Giles system. More recent Pinyin transliterations produce Dao and Daoism. (See also Daoism-Taoism Romanization issue.)

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "After transcribing", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki