Talk:Hunterian transliteration

Does anyone know a tool to transliterate from modern Hindi into English using a Hunterian method?
I found a link to a biographical page in hi.wikipedia.org. I wanted to know a bit about the person to whom the link was made. I have very limited skill in Devanagari. I guessed there would be a biography in the English version of Wikipedia, which I finally found with some difficulty. From the article on Devanagari transliteration, I found this tool which provides answers using several scholarly methods (IAST, etc.) and I could simply paste the article title into the Devanagari box. However, Hunterian transliteration is not provided, so I had to do some guessing to find the biography I wanted. If you know an on-line tool that you can recommended for this purpose, please an "External Links" section to this article on Hunterian transliteration. Oaklandguy (talk) 01:26, 9 June 2016 (UTC)
 * on the off chance you are still interested, just paste the name in Hindi and i'll see if i can help? [i have no idea what i am doing, but i could use the practice] Irtapil (talk) 04:29, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

Transliteration versus Romanization
This is obviously not a transliteration method, but one of Romanization. It reflects (in a different script) the pronunciation of the text, not the script as written. We should reword the article and then rename it. Shreevatsa (talk) 18:51, 13 September 2016 (UTC)


 * Doesn't transliteration, in a broad sense, just mean changing alphabets? (by analogy I think tomatoes and pumpkin are on "list of vegetables" not "list of fruits", and Urdu alphabet isn't titled "abjad".) If not, what is the term for it that isn't specific to the Latin alphabet? We can use Romanization here, but what is the general process called if it's not transliteration? Irtapil (talk) 04:26, 12 March 2020 (UTC)


 * come to think of it, do any Urdu transliteration systems disambiguate all the letters inherited from Arabic? e.g. ط ت ؛ ص ث س ؛ ظ ز ذ ض and if so... why? if you have enough special characters to distinguish all that, you've probably got the Arabic characters as well ... and if you know what all the modified Latin letters mean... you'd be able to read the Arabic? so what would it be used for? Irtapil (talk) 04:26, 12 March 2020 (UTC)


 * The words I've seen used most often are "Romanization" and "transcription" (sometimes "conversion", and yes, sometimes, sloppily, "transliteration") — maybe "transcription" can serve as a generic term. You can search Google Books (or indeed the web) for terms like [transliteration versus Romanization] or [transliteration versus transcription] to see a lot of sources that make the distinction. In fact the lead of the Wikipedia article on transliteration also makes this distinction currently (emphasis mine):


 * Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters […] in predictable ways […] Transliteration is not primarily concerned with representing the sounds of the original but rather with representing the characters, ideally accurately and unambiguously. […] Conversely, transcription notes the sounds but not necessarily the spelling.


 * etc. (It too has a section on transliteration versus transcription.)


 * As for Urdu transliteration systems that disambiguate the letters: I don't know much unfortunately, but I just looked up the Library of Congress transliteration scheme (https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization/urdu.pdf) and from what I can tell it does disambiguate… see also the article at Romanization of Urdu (linked from ALA-LC romanization) which mentions:


 * There are several Romanization standards for writing Urdu among them the most prominent are Uddin and Begum Urdu-Hindustani Romanization, ALA-LC romanization and ArabTeX.


 * As for why it's useful: it's so that the source information can be preserved in a lossless way (round-trip should be possible), people with less practice reading the script can read it in another script, automated systems that make it easier to input or output in certain scripts, etc. You're right that it's most useful for someone who does already "know what all the modified Latin letters mean" (or takes a few minutes to learn it), than for casual one-off readers (for whom lossy Romanization/transcription that aims to approximate the sound is preferable). Shreevatsa (talk) 16:43, 12 March 2020 (UTC)


 * For written texts, Romanization is transliteration into the Latin (Roman) script, by definition. So, not sure I understand the distinction you are drawing. Transliteration is used far more commonly as a term than Romanization. Also, lossless round-tripping is not a requirement of transliterating. --Hunnjazal (talk) 21:58, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

hunterian code
In Module:Lang/data hunterian is used to mark text transliterated with the Hunterian transliteration. Is that part of some standard or a Wikipedia usage? I can't see it at the IETF subtag registry. -- Error (talk) 19:24, 22 January 2024 (UTC)