Transliteration of Ancient Greek into English

[Freagarach]

On 6/17/2019 at 8:32 AM, Stan` said:

As @wowgetoffyourcellphone said, specific names could be an option. Maybe @Freagarach could submit a patch for that if she wants to. There are not many occurrences of the word so it should be easy to make it togglable

You're doing it again ;)

I'm quite busy the coming weeks, but it seems like a welcome addition to me.

[Anaxandridas ho Skandiates]

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Edited April 8, 2021 by Anaxandridas ho Skandiates

[Stan`]

Actually it would just be hidden in the GUI. As long as it's a specific name defined in the XML file it will not appear. The list will be dynamically changeable.

6 minutes ago, Anaxandridas ho Skandiates said:

If I create a list identical to that with the transliterations, with large Greek ΑΒΓΔΕΖΗΘetc. characters - is it a lot of extra work to create a 2nd button 'Enable Ancient Greek characters' ?

One could just create a mod for that  

[Anaxandridas ho Skandiates]

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Edited April 8, 2021 by Anaxandridas ho Skandiates

[Stan`]

Just now, Anaxandridas ho Skandiates said:

One button surely is too little to make a whole mod, couldn't we just add the button?

That's not really just a button  You have to replace characters, make it so it works for every alphabet, you might need to have a line in every template.

[Anaxandridas ho Skandiates]

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Edited April 8, 2021 by Anaxandridas ho Skandiates

[Stan`]

11 minutes ago, Anaxandridas ho Skandiates said:

Well you are the expert on that, to my primitive mind it seems like it would be easy to just use some kind of 'replace' command by pushing a button in the settings.

But I am aware that this may not be possible or otherwise very hard, depending on how the game is programmed. And I have no understanding of the code of 0. A.D., I am just willing to help and contribute where it is meaningful.

Sure  

Aren't we all  

[Nescio]

13 hours ago, Anaxandridas ho Skandiates said:

PS. @Itms  @wowgetoffyourcellphone @Nescio would you be so very kind to give a vote on the use of Library of Congress 2010 Transliteration Standard, in the hope that we can finally come together on an acceptable solution?

A decision should be based on the strongest argument, not personal opnions, a raise of hands, or a vote count. We should not aim for the acceptable but for the best.

There are numerous reasons why I think adopting the LoC standard would not be an improvement:

• it is a standard by librarians for librarians; 0 A.D. is not a library catalogue
• it is a broad romanization, which does not differentiate between orthographic transliteration and phonetic transcription; this might sound academic, but it is relevant for 0 A.D.: the specific names should only be based on how something is written, the audio voices only on how something was pronounced. Here are two pages from P. T. Daniels, W. Bright (eds.) The World's Writing Systems (Oxford 1996) with examples to illustrate the difference: 
  Spoiler

  

• it ignores accents and iota subscripts; an example from the LoC:
  ΑΓΝΩΣΤΩΙ ΘΕΩΙ (= Ἀγνώστῳ θεῷ) Agnōstō theō
• ideally transliteration ought to be a bijection, i.e. work both ways, not only should it be immediately clear how to convert Greek, but also should it be immediately clear what the original was when viewing the transliteration; i.e. Greek↔Latin, not Greek→Latin→Greek*

• On 6/17/2019 at 8:32 AM, Stan` said:

  As we already use american English for the game it might make sense to follow american standards.

  No, it does not make sense. 0 A.D. uses US spelling for English language strings, however, the specific names are explicitly non-English; moreover, they ought to be language independent, i.e. the English, French, German, Italian translations have different generic name but are supposed to use the same specific name
• transliteration ought to be directly based on Greek, not via Latin or English

• On 6/17/2019 at 2:04 AM, Anaxandridas ho Skandiates said:

  I [...] do not agree with all in the standard

   if it's inferior then why consider it?

To summarize, the LoC standard is very much a compromise based on what is conventional, rather than on what is correct, therefore it would be a step back for 0 A.D.

[Nescio]

19 hours ago, Freagarach said:

On 6/17/2019 at 8:32 AM, Stan` said:

Maybe @Freagarach could submit a patch for that if she wants to.

You're doing it again

Sometimes it's best not to assume any gender at all; singular they can be a suitable option.

[Stan`]

26 minutes ago, Nescio said:

Sometimes it's best not to assume any gender at all; singular they can be a suitable option.

I wrote he last time and I got the same remark. I guess I could write they as it is 'inclusive' but I always find it misleading not to know whether we are speaking about one person or multiple. I sent "them" a P.M." to clarify the matter.

Can't use "one" in this context either

[Stan`]

Back on topic, I don't know, but one should be chosen, it should be the best to reflect 0 A.D.'s nature, and everything should be updated to reflect that.

[Nescio]

3 hours ago, Stan` said:

I always find it misleading not to know whether we are speaking about one person or multiple.

Same problem with “you”, isn't it? (English ...)

3 hours ago, Stan` said:

Back on topic, I don't know, but one should be chosen, it should be the best to reflect 0 A.D.'s nature, and everything should be updated to reflect that.

Yes, we all agree on that, I think.

To clarify, I started https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/SpecificNames because of https://code.wildfiregames.com/D1935#80243

It's a proposal, not set it stone, open to discussion for everyone. However, I would appreciate it if people won't say something is bad, but explain why they think something is wrong.

(In the end it's up to @Itms to make a final decision, because he's the project leader.)

On 1/11/2019 at 10:24 PM, Itms said:

https://trac.wildfiregames.com/changeset/16666

This was the last attempt at standardizing Greek, four years ago. I believe it can be summarized with:

• β→b
• γ→n before γ, κ, χ, ξ and γ→g elsewhere
• κ→k, χ→kh, ξ→x
• υ→u after vowels and υ→y elsewhere
• η→ē, ω→ō
• α→a, ά→á, ᾶ→â, ὰ→à

My proposal goes a bit further:

• ξ→ks
  • {κ, χ, ξ→k, kh, ks} is consistent with {π, φ, ψ→p, ph, ps}, ξ→x is not
  • (Attic) ΧΣ = Ξ (Ionic)
  • ks is common in modern scholarship (see earlier post and below)
• υ→u (all positions)
  • for transliteration consistency (see earlier posts)
  • reflective of different Greek alphabets
  • common in modern scholarship (see below)
• indicate vowel length, i.e. differentiate between α, ι, υ and ᾱ, ῑ, ῡ
  • dictionaries indicate vowel length
  • the difference is meaningful, e.g. ἄᾰτος and ἄᾱτος are two different words (from first page LSJ)
  • allows distinguishing between αι (ai) and ᾳ (āi)
  • common in modern scholarship (see below)
  • both of you (@Stan` and @Itms) expressed macra would be nice to have

Ideally 0 A.D. would use similar standards for different ancient languages. Celtic, Greek, Latin, Persian, Sanskrit are all Indo-European languages; there is an entire academic discipline for that.

Here are three pages from R. S. P. Beekes Comparative Indo-European Linguistics / An Introduction [Second edition; revised and corrected by Michiel de Vaan] (Amsterdam/Philadelphia 2011):

Spoiler

Greek:

Sanskrit:

Latin:

As you can see, my proposal complies with that.

Edited June 21, 2019 by Nescio
ce

[Freagarach]

3 hours ago, Stan` said:

I wrote he last time and I got the same remark. I guess I could write they as it is 'inclusive' but I always find it misleading not to know whether we are speaking about one person or multiple. I sent "them" a P.M." to clarify the matter.

Can't use "one" in this context either

Sorry for the confusion. The first time we were discussing a topic regarding genders and the difficulties about that, so I found it ironic that right at that point my gender was assumed, so I made a remark about that, not really about the gender itself. I did not foresee (I could have perhaps, my bad) that that led to another assumption due to miscommunication.

I had to react on this (the "she") now because I can't stand people being wrong as a consequence of my actions

[Anaxandridas ho Skandiates]

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Edited April 8, 2021 by Anaxandridas ho Skandiates

[Anaxandridas ho Skandiates]

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Edited April 8, 2021 by Anaxandridas ho Skandiates

[Anaxandridas ho Skandiates]

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Edited April 8, 2021 by Anaxandridas ho Skandiates

[Lion.Kanzen]

@Sundiata @Genava55

[Loki1950]

There are currently six living dialects of the Celtic language group sure their pronunciation has changed from the anarchic form but they survive and are very well documented including some of the phoneme shifts.

Enjoy the Choice     

[Anaxandridas ho Skandiates]

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Edited April 8, 2021 by Anaxandridas ho Skandiates

[Stan`]

11 hours ago, Anaxandridas ho Skandiates said:

. @Itms and the other 0 A.D. Team members, you can have living recordings for all Greek characters if you want, to replace the horribly flawed and corrupted ones full of mistakes currently in place. I

I believe Itms recorded those, but heh.

 

I still don't see how vocal sounds have to do with the way we write text ?

10 hours ago, Anaxandridas ho Skandiates said:

I could not contribute anything at all, because there is no standard, it was all stalled and stalled. So I do not know, now again my compromise proposal was rejected and called inferior - when would you like to have the standard agreed upon? 2025 A.D.? Maybe 2030?

You could have contributed art no ?

 

[Sundiata]

7 hours ago, Lion.Kanzen said:

@Sundiata @Genava55

I don't know what Kushite voices he's talking about.. I know Stan' the man did some recordings, but were they ever committed? 90% of the written language in-game is the Napatan dialect of Late Egyptian, which was used as the official language of the Kingdom of Kush until the 3rd century BC and I believe a broken version continued to be used in some religious inscriptions for several centuries after that. Both languages were spoken during our timeframe, but I avoided too much Meroitic because there are literally only a handful of people in the world who have any real understanding of the language, and the huge bulk of the referenced texts in the research are also written in Napatan. Only a handful of terms and titles are Meroitic in game. 

As for the rest:

Spoiler

I actually studied some Greek in high school, but I'm not nearly knowledgable enough on the subject to weigh in on the discussion... 

 

11 hours ago, Anaxandridas ho Skandiates said:

months and months pass by

Months are like days in 0AD... 17 years of development so far. Alpha 24 is still going to take many more months... Patience is key. The more antsy you get, the less likely people are going to sacrifice their free time to help you out with this. Many people have waited years to see their favorite features in game. I'm not saying it needs to take years, preferably not, but if you can't manage to reach a consensus, no progress is going to be made. Either change your approach, or properly evaluate and try to understand others' viewpoints. @Nescio's knowledge on Greek subjects is respected in this forum for good reason. If you claim one standard, and Nescio claims another standard, and both of these standards are used in academia, it's probably going to take a little more than belligerence to convince the community of one direction or the other. Frankly, this war of standards is probably a matter of personal taste, more than anything. 

Edited June 22, 2019 by Sundiata

[Anaxandridas ho Skandiates]

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Edited April 8, 2021 by Anaxandridas ho Skandiates

[Nescio]

1 hour ago, Stan` said:

I still don't see how vocal sounds have to do with the way we write text ? 

Exactly! How something is written and how something is pronounced can be two different things.

And the common English equivalent can be yet another thing too; however, that's not the discussion here, so perhaps rename this topic to “Transliteration of Ancient Greek” without “into English”.

12 hours ago, Anaxandridas ho Skandiates said:

adopt the Library of Congress 2010 Transliteration Standard.

@Nescio claims it is an inferior standard

The standard itself can be perfectly suitable for others (e.g. library catalogues), yet be an inferior option for 0 A.D.'s specific situation. If you want to convince others, please provide strong arguments, and refute mine.

12 hours ago, Anaxandridas ho Skandiates said:

thereby he means of course also to signify that my knowledge and understanding of Greek is inferior since the proposer must surely be as inferior as his proposal.

No, certainly not! We can both be knowledgeable and yet vehemently disagree on something. Don't take it personal. It's not about winning a discussion.

12 hours ago, Anaxandridas ho Skandiates said:

@Nescio refused this and other compromises, insisting on his own ideas.

Although I proposed it, they are not my own ideas conjured up out of thin air—it's based on modern scholarship. If ignoring everything else, do take a careful look at the sources in the spoilers of my earlier posts.

12 hours ago, Anaxandridas ho Skandiates said:

ΝΗΣΧΙΕ ΑΙΤΙΑΟΜΑΙ.

mea culpa

6 hours ago, Anaxandridas ho Skandiates said:

From the period of 0 A.D., 500BC-500AD, we have surviving Greek textual material amounting to some ~90000000 words -
Pray, just out of curiosity for a comparison for a non-expert like me, from the same period, how many words are extant in all texts, inscriptions and quotations in classical sources included, of all Celtic languages combined?

The entire corpus of all European (in a geographic sense) languages up to c. 500 AD is about 90% Greek, 9% Latin, and a tiny remainder consisting of everything else.

As for Celtic and Meroitic, my knowledge of those is practically zero, but I assume @Genava55 and @Sundiata know what they're doing. And I'm not even sure what is used for the Carthaginians (Hebrew?) and Iberians (Basque?). Anyway, let's just focus on Greek.

[Nescio]

As for the audio voices, I never listened to them, I always play games muted. Nonetheless, I don't expect them to be perfect; the Persian is reportedly Farsi (800 AD onwards—but probably Iran 2018), which is quite different from Darius' Old Persian (c. 500 BC).

If you have the equipment, skill, time, and motivation to correct, update, and replace audio recordings, please, don't hesitate to go ahead.

Edited June 22, 2019 by Nescio
2018

[Anaxandridas ho Skandiates]

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Edited April 8, 2021 by Anaxandridas ho Skandiates