Template talk:transliteration

The following information passed a request for deletion.

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

---

Is this what a standard template is supposed to look like? I don't know. But its parameters seem nonintuitive for non-English terms. Perhaps it's better to just use the separate components {{etyl}} and {{term}} instead of the lengthy template. TeleComNasSprVen 05:27, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

Either delete or improve. It's not really doing anything useful right now. But if it were to categorize somehow, I'd keep it. But Category:English transliterations just looks wrong. Mglovesfun (talk) 12:04, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

• I've added some additional params to handle more cases, and logic for categorization. Hopefully this template is now more useful. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 17:18, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
  • Take a look at Tchaikovsky#Etymology, Ivanovich#Etymology, and Ivanovna#Etymology. It appears to be broken. —Angr 17:25, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
    • Thanks, Angr. I'd noticed those as I was checking what used the template. The template calls for these had deliberately omitted the second argument (a value of en in this case), so I added it. These RU-derived entries are all appearing correctly now for me; are they for you? -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 19:01, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

Does this template make sense? An etymology describes how the word came about, e.g., by derivation, borrowing, as calqueing, compounding. “Transliteration” seems to only describe how this particular spelling was determined. —Michael Z. 2013-03-25 18:50 z

• Japanese tends to borrow terms by transcribing them phonetically into katakana. After having gained currency, these words can often wind up with meanings that deviate in interesting ways from the source term. One personal favorite is フェミニスト (​feminisuto), originally just a pure transcription of EN feminist, but as I had it described to me, in common parlance this sometimes basically means a man who is polite enough to say "please" when demanding that a woman subordinate bring him coffee.  :-P

What other process would you describe it as but transcription for these terms, or for EN Tchaikovsky, etc.? -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 19:01, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

Well, I’m not sure how to apply the terminology of word formation to proper names. Tchaikovsky, also spelled Chaykovsky or Čajkovskyj, for example, is a Russian name, not exactly an English word borrowed from Russian. The various spellings of the name are a result of transliteration or transcription, but that is not the same as word formation. It may be that this template does make sense for proper names, but I’d worry that it’s easy for editors to start incorrectly using this template for every borrowing. —Michael Z. 2013-03-25 19:46 z

Aha. Hmm. Japanese does borrow sometimes by calqueing (if that's a word), but for modern terms, the most common mechanism is straight transcription. Thus does Google become グーグル (Gūguru, a proper noun), thence グーグる (gūguru, a verb). Given the difference in script, transcription is a necessary part of the borrowing process. Would that meet your criteria for using this in an etym section? -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 19:55, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

The word femenisuto on the other hand, appears to be a standard borrowing from English, having its own specialized sense and usage, as many borrowings do. —Michael Z. 2013-03-25 19:58 z

[Oops – non sequitur, sorry. I somehow posted that without seeing your reply] —Michael Z. 2013-03-25 20:00 z

As far as I understand (and I am not an expert), borrowing is a method of w:word formation, while transliteration is not. So I don’t think it’s appropriate to use this template as a substitute for {{borrowing}}.

Do you want to add it to some etymologies? What information does it add? Are there borrowings that are clearly not transliterated or transcribed? —Michael Z. 2013-03-25 20:19 z

• The template is now appearing correctly for me, but I agree that it's kind of pointless. Being a transliteration isn't an etymology, and words like Tchaikovsky, Ivanovich, and Ivanovna are already defined as being transliterations in their definition sections, so having this template in the Etymology section is redundant. —Angr 21:02, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

• @Angr, that's fine for these three EN entries. However, for KO term 퀸 (kwin), CMN term 切羅基／切罗基, and JA term コンビニエンスストア, the def lines don't say anything about transcription, while the etym sections do. Given that etymology describes how a word came to be in a language, that seems appropriate to me. Having "transliteration" in the def line seems a bit out of place somehow...
• @Michael, this is the first I've seen of {{borrowing}} -- it just doesn't get much use in the current corpus of JA entries here, so I'd never run across it before. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. I'm surprised this is the first I've seen of it, given the prevalence of borrowing. Perhaps folks have preferred the simpler "From..." notation?

Looking at the source for that template, I notice that there is no [[Category:{Lang} terms borrowed from {Lang}]], which would seem more useful than just [[Category:{Lang} borrowed terms]]. The former would presumably be a subset of the latter.

Would anyone object to the addition of such categories? -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 22:23, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

Not I! It has long annoyed me that {{borrowing}} puts words into "Category:Foo borrowed terms" and "Category:Foo terms derived from Bar" instead of "Category:Foo terms borrowed from Bar". For one thing, borrowings are usually considered to be separate from derivations, and it could be very handy to distinguish between, say, French terms borrowed from Latin (like légal) and French terms derived from Latin (like loyal). The big drawback continues to be that {{borrowing}} is used so rarely. —Angr 21:21, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

"Derived", to me, can mean both borrowing and inheriting. So maybe we need a different name, like Category:French terms inherited from Latin. I'm not sure if that would exclude Category:English terms inherited from Anglo-Norman, though. —CodeCat 22:09, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

It should, but it will get confusing in cases where a word is inherited from an earlier stage in which the word was a borrowing, e.g. judge, which in Modern English is inherited from Middle English, where it's borrowed from Anglo-Norman. So it's not exactly either an "English term borrowed from Anglo-Norman" or an "English term inherited from Anglo-Norman". All very tricksy. —Angr 06:00, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

This just came up in Feedback, where a (presumably Arabic) user was complaining about an Arabic word borrowed from English alcohol being categorized as derived from Old French, even though it came from Arabic before it got to Old French. Any of these complicated combinations of borrowing, inheritance and re-borrowing can get really messy. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:05, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

• As I've been thinking through how to distinguish between borrowings and other derivations, I've grown increasingly muddled, and Chuck's example here reinforces my view that this muddle is probably why {{borrowing}} hasn't been used that much, with editors preferring to just say "From XX"... -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 15:29, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

• Kept for lack of consensus and action. --Chicken is fun (talk) 15:50, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Link

This edit has the benefit of replacing a deprecated template with a standard one, but the drawback is that it no longer allows the reader to quickly consult an explanation of the word 'transliteration'. It would be trivial to modify this template to link the word transliteration, and I don't see any drawbacks. It may sound like a basic word to us, but it's still jargon that isn't universally understood. 96.57.6.131 04:31, 17 March 2022 (UTC)