[XeTeX] Polyglossia: Support for romanization of CJK

Gerrit z0idberg at gmx.de
Sat Jun 18 20:09:48 CEST 2011


Am 17.06.2011 19:29, schrieb Andy Lin:
> You have to be careful with Chinese. In Mandarin, you have Pinyin, but
> you also have several conflicting romanization schemes in use in
> Taiwan and older literature. For Cantonese, Hokkien, etc, syllable
> boundaries are not quite as easy to determine because they retain
> non-nasal codas.

Hello,

yes, I know. But stuff like Wade-Giles etc. could just be added like a 
different romanization system (e.g. when you set up Chinese as a second 
language, you select the option Pinyin, Wade-Giles, Guoyu Luomazi etc.). 
For Japanese, you could select Hepburn, Kunrei etc.
I thought of romanization which is specific to the language the 
surrounding text is written in - e.g. French or German. And this is not 
so much the case for Chinese or Japanese (except for some words: Beijing 
in English but Peking in German). In contrast, Горбачёв is written 
Gorbatschow in German, Gorbachev in English and Gorbatchev in French. If 
you have stuff like this, you cannot really create hyphenation rules for 
only the language you want to transcribe (e.g. Russian), but you have to 
create a transcription system for every target language (German, 
English, French etc). But actually, I guess that would also be possible: 
Create specific hyphenation patters for these surrounding languages and 
then let Polyglossia automatically select the hyphenation patter 
according to the environment, where the e.g. Russian text is appearing in.

But I am not sure if in literature about these countries, there is not 
used a more scientific transcription, which is universal for all 
surrounding languages.

Gerrit


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