On 12/20/06, sean@epoptic.com sean@epoptic.com wrote:
On Wed, Dec 20, 2006 at 02:48:48PM +0000, Thomas Dalton wrote:
The issue isn't really ethnocentric, or language-centric, it's script-centric. SUL should have a feature that allows you to transliterate your name into various scripts (or even does it for you if possible, there isn't necessarily a one-to-one relationship between characters [or sequences of characters] in different scripts, so it could be quite hard) and it uses the appropriate one on each project. The same name written in two different scripts is still the same name, it's just written in a way that the people reading it can understand.
It's not just a matter of distinguishing between two Japanese, say, names, it's also a matter of pronoucing them - it can slow down reading quite a lot of some of the words aren't pronouncible to you (even if you aren't reading out loud).
So ... what would you do about names like "Seabhcan" (or "Sean," for that matter) that are pronounced in ways nonintuitive to most Anglophones?
I assign a mental pronunciation that is probably quite incorrect. The key point is that I *can* assign a pronunciation to "Seabhcan" or "Cthulhu", and I can easily tell the difference between the two. I can't do that for something like "メインページ".