[XeTeX] Polyglossia: Support for romanization of CJK

[Andy Lin]

On Sat, Jun 18, 2011 at 14:09, Gerrit <z0idberg at gmx.de> wrote:
> 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.

Do you have examples of this outside of proper names? I haven't come
across such a case and it'd be interesting to see. But wouldn't such
variation defeat the purpose of romanization? I mean, consider the
confusion that the Taiwanese government has caused by variously
supporting Hanyu pinyin, Tongyong pinyin, and Wade-Giles (you can see
all three in use on the Taipei metro system).

>
> 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.

There's IPA, but that's only for phonetic/phonemic transcription in
linguistics papers, and you wouldn't want to hyphenate it anyway.

I am curious about the necessity of hyphenating romanization. Is it
desirable? I would have thought that foreign words should be treated
like proper nouns in running text.

-Andy