Talk:romanization

Merge?

Common wisdom dictates that this be merged with romanize, but this form, I believe, is more common. What's the verdict, folks? --BDD 19:07, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Not sure. This could also have a second noun sense: colloquially, "a romanization" can refer to a particular romanization system or method. On the other hand, the conventional noun sense is a perfect synonym for the act of Romanizing. —Mzajac 20:33, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Phonetic, esp. Asian

According to NOAD and CanOD, this simply means to put into Latin alphabet or type. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with phonology or phonetics (that would be phonemic or phonetic transcription). As a matter of detail, some romanization methods try to preserve phonetic characteristics, but others are strict transliteration systems aimed only at conveying orthography (e.g. w: ISO 9:1995, for romanizing Cyrillic characters consistently from any language, many of which have conflicting phonology represented by particular letters).

I find "especially from Asian languages" to be dubious, as the term is used in a more general sense by the United Nations (cf. UN Working Group on Romanization Systems), both British and U.S. geographical agencies (cf. BGN/PCGN Romanization Systems and Roman-Script Spelling Conventions), and the U.S. Library of Congress (cf. ALA-LC Romanization Tables: Transliteration Schemes for Non-Roman Scripts). The only caveat is that the term (Latin) transliteration cannot be applied to non-alphabetic (ie logographic) Asian languages, so "romanization" is used exclusively for them.

I'll adjust the definition appropriately. —Mzajac 21:28, 6 March 2008 (UTC)