หลักเกณฑ์การทับศัพท์ภาษาโปรตุเกส

“จง​ขอ​เถิด แล้ว​ท่าน​จะ​ได้​รับ จง​แสวงหา​เถิด แล้ว​ท่าน​จะ​พบ จง​เคาะ​ประตู​เถิด แล้ว​เขา​จะ​เปิด​ประตู​รับ​ท่าน เพราะ​คน​ที่​ขอ​ย่อม​ได้​รับ คน​ที่​แสวงหา​ย่อม​พบ คน​ที่​เคาะ​ประตู​ย่อม​มี​ผู้​เปิด​ประตู​ให้”

Mt 7:7–8

To my surprise, I’ve found out that the Royal Institute of Thailand has actually issued rules for the transliteration of foreign words into Thai! From all I’ve read about them, I should actually be surprised I didn’t think of looking it up before.

From what I can gather, and just as I’d imagined, they’ve come up with systems that attempt to reflect as much of the phonology of the original languages and yet represent as much of the original orthographic features and idiosyncrasies by the Thai script.

The languages whose standards have been published seem to be:

• Arabic;
• Chinese;
• English;
• French;
• German;
• Hindi;
• Italian;
• Japanese;
• Korean;
• Malay;
• Russian;
• Spanish;
• Vietnamese.

That means that, contrarily to what the title of this post says, there doesn’t seem to be an official system for Portuguese.

For many features of Portuguese, I could actually come up with a reasonable basic system derived from common rules taken from the published standards that would also be valid for Portuguese – the representation of /ʒ/ by ฌ, for instance; for others, however, I wouldn’t be able to trace any parallels at all and would have to rely on examples found online and, well, my own whim – such as how to deal with unique sounds or raised (neutralised) unstressed vowels (to represent phonology or to reflect orthography?).

Marasmo

So much linguistic apathy and stagnation in my life right now, and I’m not used to it at all. The thing, however, is that ‘real life’, so to speak, is taking a heavy toll on me versus languages these days – even though I’m also to blame for being so bad at organising myself any efficiently.

It’s been basically me and Polish for a while now. But gosh, do I miss Arabic! And Japanese! And German! And the step-by-step movement away from Portuñol towards Rioplatense Spanish! And the never-ending task of consciously polishing my British-oriented English! And French! And Italian!

Not that I’m not tempted by other languages that have always appealed to me – from Thai and Swahili to Hungarian and Welsh, with even Faroese and Old Tupi sprinkled somewhere in between –, but I had to learn how to be practical and realistic at some point. Having lost all my digital language materials when my HDD was fried by lightning / a power surge (and I had no useful recent backup whatsoever) did certainly help with that.

There are also the languages I used to love deeply, but that for this or that reason have lost the appeal they once held, the prime examples being Greek, Persian and Vietnamese.

And last but not least, there’s Bulgarian forever skulking below the surface – a language that I’ve loved from day one, so many years ago, even when it was absolutely impossible for me to even think about it, but that I’ve possibly mistreated all along.

Arabic-Romance

Arabic طاولة ⟨ṭāwilah⟩ for ‘table’ is just too obvious a Romance borrowing to miss! It comes from Italian tavola, to be more specific.

P.S.: I can’t for the sake of me remember which transliteration of Arabic I’d adopted in the past.

Ice, ice, baby!

That awkward moment of anxiety when you just can’t remember a word you should know and there’s no cognate that can save you! I just couldn’t for the sake of me remember how to say ‘ice’ in French; I knew it wasn’t a cognate to Portuguese gelo (or to Spanish hielo, for that matter), but I couldn’t remember the Italian word either, and that I did guess was a cognate to the French word! What a bummer… The obvious (but disappointing) solution was to look it up after all – French glace and Italian ghiaccio.

The Italian and the French words derive from Latin glacies (‘ice’), while the Portuguese and the Spanish words come from Latin gelu (‘frost’, ‘chill’); both, however, are ultimately derived from Proto-Indo-European *gel- (‘cold’).

By the way, French has gel and Italian has gelo, but the meaning is still the same as in Latin.

Bible library

After spending the whole weekend busy with Bible software modules, I should definitely start keeping track of all these different versions of different translations in different languages. Uff! Needless to say most translations to be found online are Protestant, and, although there’s nothing inherently wrong with that at all, I still prefer to try and find a Catholic translation instead whenever possible – if anything, because of the doctrinal details that may get involved.

Since Bibles in English are much more throughoutly documented and easier to follow, I’ve settled on the Douay-Rheims Bible and the New Jerusalem Bible as my standard texts in English.

I did get a Catholic translation for Italian, but it’s not the CEI Bible, so I need to look further into it; for French, the Jerusalem Bible fits perfectly.

For Latin, I’ve made a conscious decision to keep track of the three Vulgate texts and try my best to choose the Nova Vulgata whenever possible.

For Bulgarian, I was lucky enough to get to know the Orthodox Bible, and that does seem like what I’d been looking for. I didn’t really find particular pieces of information on the translation, though, so I’m not sure whether there are/were variants or even when it was published.

For other languages, things are definitely on more vague grounds. The Croatian modules I found have no indication of version, year etc., and the lack of the Deuterocanon makes me think they’re Protestant. I was lucky enough to get the text for the Neophytus Vamvas Translation, for Modern Greek, but, although it seems to be an Orthodox translation, mine also lacks the Deuterocanonical books, so I wonder whether it was edited on this particular purpose… I got to find what seems to be a very good Catholic Thai Bible, but I’m yet to read more about its origins and background. And, to keep things within my mainstream languages, I got to download two different translations into Persian; one seems to be more modern than the other by the little I could find out, but, in all honesty, I’ve got no idea what they’re about either (other than the lack of the Deuterocanon as well).

For the most part, though, I still have to check online, non-downloadable translations, such as for Portuguese itself.