Tag Archives: orthography

The Faroese Chimera

Faroese, together with Icelandic and some west Norwegian dialects, descends from Old West Norse. While the Icelandic written norm is very old, and its speakers have pretty much been monolingual from the beginning, Danish was the official language of the Faroe Islands for much of their history, and its speakers didn’t even really have a written norm until at least the 19th century.

The Faroese standard orthography as it exists today is the fruit of the work of Venceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb (1819–1909), who created the basis of the system in 1849. Faroese has got a number of dialects, but no standard spoken language, a situation that exists now as it did back then, which led Hammershaimb to devise an etymological orthography stemming from the language’s Norse origins, borrowing many elements from the Icelandic system for such a goal, but not basing himself on any particular Faroese dialect per se.

Because of its origins, therefore, Faroese orthography is a beast to be tamed by both native and foreign speakers alike, even if on its own terms for each of such groups.

The very first time I’ve ever read anything on Faroese spelling, I remember having the impression of a random, memory-load-based system, with orthography and pronunciation being two different animals you just had to link in your head and move on with it. In that respect, that was, at some point, my impression on all Scandinavian languages to a certain degree, and it’s only after all these years that I can say I can at least understand where each of them is coming from; Faroese, however, continued to look like a chimera.

As I became interested in the language, though, I couldn’t escape facing up to such a monster from the start. Just like I’d done to Scottish Gaelic once, I chose to turn to trying to build spelling patterns and drilling them into my head in a very mechanical fashion. Is that the best way to deal with it? I doubt it, but I couldn’t really think of any other way of doing it, and I definitely don’t trust my listening skills at all in order to try and match sound to letters using my ears alone.

Because of that, my first days (and weeks) of handling Faroese were like putting puzzles together. If I had the word maður ‘man’, for instance, my mind would parse it letter by letter:

  • m- = initial, so straightforward [m];
  • -a- = stressed; long, because -ð- is silent, so [ɛaː];
  • -ð- = silent, but this creates a hiatus that requires a glide to undo; between -a- and -u-, that requires [v];
  • -u- = unstressed, therefore short, so [ʊ];
  • -r- = final, so [ɹ].

Hence maður = [ˈmɛaːvʊɹ].

Needless to say, this is very, very tedious, and requires a lot of flipping back and forth my resources. To make things even more complicated, I soon found out the way Faroese is phonetically transcribed is anything but straightforward and standardised; on the contrary, I’ve been pretty met all sorts of systems and have been sieving them in a way that makes sense to me, amalgamating them in a system of my own that is nevertheless still very subjective, idiosyncratic and idealised. This topic alone would require its very own post, and I didn’t even take dialectal variations into consideration here.

However, I’ve been so excited with Faroese from the start that even such a process hasn’t put me off, and I eventually got to learn a lot from it, so that nowadays there are only certain details that I find myself looking up in the end, having internalised many, if not most, of the features already.

References:

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?).

ฌ

From a past post of mine:

And why ever did I start spelling my second name as โฌแซ instead of, say, โจแซ? I just can’t remember.

I do remember now – I got it from French!

I obviously know very little about how Thais reason when transcribing foreign names. The few bits I do know I’ve learnt from observing details here and there as I go along.

Thai lacks both /ʒ/ and /ʑ/, but has both /tɕ/ and /tɕʰ/; my thinking of spelling โจแซ /tɕoː sɛː/ was to substitute จ /tɕ/ for Portuguese /ʒ/.

However, it’s only taken me a couple of further examples to realise that Thai (surprisingly?) seems to prefer using ฌ /tɕʰ/ for /ʒ/ instead; Portuguese names are harder to come by, but French offers more than a few:

  • ฌ็อง /tɕʰɔŋ/ for ‘Jean’;
  • ฌูว์ลี /tɕʰuː liː/ for ‘Julie’;
  • ฌัก /tɕʰák/ for ‘Jacques’;
  • แฌร์แม็ง /tɕʰɛː mɛŋ/ for ‘Germain’;
  • ฌอร์ฌ /tɕʰɔ̂ːt/ for ‘Georges’; etc.

I could only wonder why that’s so though. I mean, for /tɕʰ/ alone, Thai also has ฉ and ช; assuming consonant classes have a role to play, ฉ is a high consonant, but both ช and ฌ are low consonants, and the former is, for all I know, far more common in Thai.

Some more examples seem to shed light on the matter, implying that’s the case because Thai saves ช for foreign /tʃ/ and /ʃ/ (e.g. ริชาร์ด /ríʔ tɕʰâːd/ for ‘Richard’ and ดูว์ช็อง /duː tɕʰɔŋ/ for ‘Duchamp’). Since I’ve indeed always read that Thai transliterations try to preserve as much of the original foreign spelling as possible, that’s an interesting way to do so.

O mal do mau

I’ve been マルセル ⟨Maruseru⟩ for over a decade, so I couldn’t help getting really surprised to learn that fellow countrymen have apparently decided to go fully phonetic in their renderings and become マルセウ ⟨Maruseu⟩ themselves.

Not that it doesn’t make sense, but it’s a type of transcription that I myself have always avoided when spelling names in other scripts, for both visual/subjective and practical reasons. I’m even sure I’ve written something about it once, a long time ago.

Take a surname such as Silva, for instance. In a simple, ‘traditional’ transcription into Japanese, you might have シルバ ⟨Shiruba⟩. The Japanese, however, can (and apparently often will) have an option for ⟨v⟩ (even when they still pronounce it as ⟨b⟩), which might give シルヴァ ⟨Shiruva⟩. But why stop at that if you can (at least visually) indicate a ‘proper’ /si/? You might go on and have スィルヴァ ⟨Siruva⟩ after all. And finally, if you’re to represent the semivocalic nature of the ⟨l⟩, you may end up with スィウヴァ ⟨Siuva⟩. Convoluted much?

I agree it’s difficult to reach a compromise between spelling and pronunciation, but, considering all the variations in the Portuguese-speaking world, I myself usually go for the former in such situations, since orthography is far more likely to represent a broader (if not an absolute) standard.

I wonder whether a Portuguese Luís would go to any lengths to be a ルイシュ ⟨Ruishu⟩ in order to be distinguished from a Brazilian ルイス ⟨Ruisu⟩.

Thai provided me an interesting exception to this, though. I’m มาร์แซล /maːsɛːn/, but I’ve always found it cute to be just แซว /sɛːw/ as a nickname too!

στεγανός (steganós) + γράφω ‎(gráphō)

In a way, I do find it disappointing that a word such as ‘steganography’ is borrowed into Japanese as ステガノグラフィー ⧼suteganogurafii⧽; I did think they’d have gone along the (elegant) lines of a compound such as Chinese 隐写术 (隱寫術) ⧼yǐnxiěshù⧽.

Korean has 스테가노그래피 ⧼seuteganogeuraepi⧽ too, but Vietnamese must have an interesting choice behind kỹ thuật giấu thư – any native speakers that might enlighten me?

Ortografia fonética… só que não!

I still find it creepy that (Eastern) Armenian is considered to have a high grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence, but, when you actually look at it more closely, it’s not really that simple. The first word that comes to my mind is թագավոր ⟨tʿagavor⟩ (‘king’), which is actually pronounced ⟨tʿakʿavor⟩ – the consonant գ ⟨g⟩ is pronounced as ք ⟨kʿ⟩ because it occurs between two vowels. The problem, however, is that this isn’t a strict, general rule, because it’s only applied to part of the Armenian lexicon, particularly in the standard language.

P.S.: An even better example of how such deviations cannot be taken generally – in the name Գաբրիել ⟨Gabriel⟩, the letter բ ⟨b⟩ is actually pronounced as փ ⟨pʿ⟩, but it’s pronounced as expected in the name Աբել ⟨Abel⟩, even though it occurs in the same environment (that of a voiced bilabial plosive that either occurs between two vowels or follows a vowel).

P.P.S.: Oh, Lord! I had actually already written about it before! The post can be found here.