Scientific transliteration

Scientific transliteration, also called the "International Scholarly System", is a system for transliteration of text from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet (romanization). This system is most often seen in linguistics publications on Slavic languages.

The scientific transliteration system is roughly as phonemic as is the orthography of the language transliterated. The deviations are with щ, where the transliteration makes clear that two phonemes are involved, and џ, where it fails to represent the (monophonemic) affricate with a single letter. The transliteration system is based on the Croatian alphabet, in which each letter corresponds directly to a Cyrillic letter of the related Serbian language. It was codified in the 1898 Prussian Instructions for libraries, or "Preußische Instruktionen" ("PI"). It can also be used to romanize the early Glagolitic alphabet, which has a close correspondence to Cyrillic.

Scientific transliteration was the basis for the ISO 9 transliteration standard. While linguistic transliteration tries to preserve the original language’s pronunciation to a certain degree, the latest version of the ISO standard (ISO 9:1995) has abandoned this concept which was still found in ISO/R 9-1968 and is now restricted to a universal 1:1 mapping of letters. It thus allows for unambiguous reverse transliteration into the original Cyrillic text and is language-independent.

The previous official Soviet romanization system, GOST 16876-71, is also based on scientific transliteration, but using Latin "h" for cyrillic "х" instead of Latin "x". Most countries using Cyrillic script now have adopted GOST 7.79 instead, which is equivalent to ISO 9.

Representing all of the necessary diacritics on computers requires Unicode, Latin-2, Latin-4, or Latin-7 encoding.

* Archaic letters † Church Slavonic Iotified A (IA)

Letters in parentheses are older or alternate transliterations. Ukrainian and Belarusian apostrophe are not transcribed. Early Cyrillic letter koppa (Ҁ, ҁ) was used only for transliterating Greek, and for its numeric value, so it is omitted. ISO 9:1995 is provided for comparison.

See also

* Romanization of Bulgarian
* Romanization of Russian
* Romanization of Ukrainian

References

* (Winter 2003) "Transliteration", in "Slavic and East European Journal", 47 (4):backmatter—every issue of this journal has a transliteration reference in the back, including a table labelled “ISO Transliteration System”, although it is different from the latest version of ISO 9:1995.
* IDS (Informationsverbund Deutschschweiz, 2001) "Katalogisierungsregeln IDS (KIDS), Anhänge, “ [http://www.informationsverbund.ch/fileadmin/user_upload/dokumente/katalogisierung/kids/kids_deutsch/KapG4.pdf IDS G.4: Transliteration der slavischen kyrillischen Alphabete] ”". Universität Zürich. URL accessed on 2007-12-05 (PDF format, in German)—ISO/R 9 1968 standardization of scientific transliteration

External links

* [http://intranet.library.arizona.edu/users/brewerm/sil/lib/transhist.html Transliteration history] —history of the transliteration of Slavic languages into Latin alphabets
* [http://ling.northwestern.edu/~ads778/pdfs/osuwpss_stylesheet.pdf Linguistics Style Sheet] of Ohio State University Slavic Studies (PDF)—Scientific transliteration for various languages is shown in a table on p. 4.
* [http://transliteration.eki.ee/ Transliteration of Non-Roman Scripts]