ASCII Compatible Romanization

Conworlds and conlangs
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Nachtswalbe
Posts: 295
Joined: Thu Sep 24, 2020 7:41 pm

ASCII Compatible Romanization

Post by Nachtswalbe »

Romanizations can and do include apostrophes, accent marks and the like. However, accent marks are difficult to type on English-language keyboards, and it is easier for English-based HTML, URLs to display ASCII characters.
For languages like Hindi and Arabic, ASCIIfications exist. However these rely on distinctions between capitall and lowercase letters, which is inefficient and unaesthetic.
This can also be extended to languages traditionally written in the Latin alphabet with diacritics, like French.

Arabic:
/b t d tˤ k q/ <b t d tc k q>
/d dˤ d͡ʒ f/ <d dc j f>
/s sˤ ʃ x ~ χ ħ h/ <s sc sh kh hc h>
/ð z ðˤ ~ zˤ ɣ ~ ʁ[k] ʕ/ <dh z zc gh c>
/ʔ m n w r l j/ <x m n w r l y>
/a i u a: i: u: aj aw/ <a i u aa ii uu ay aw>

examples:
ṭabīb, "doctor" --> Tcabiib
/ʔa.tˤib.baːʔ/ "doctors, m.pl" --> xatcibbaax
أحجية <xuhcjiyya>
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Raphael
Posts: 4175
Joined: Sun Jul 22, 2018 6:36 am

Re: ASCII Compatible Romanization

Post by Raphael »

No problem - just write a first draft in Unicode, then convert it to hexadecimal.

(I'm joking, in case that wasn't clear.)
fusijui
Posts: 225
Joined: Sat Apr 18, 2020 1:51 pm

Re: ASCII Compatible Romanization

Post by fusijui »

For the first decade or so of my online conlanging life (30 years ago now!) ASCII was the only option for conlangs and for phonetic/phonemic transcriptions; even now I remember the struggles between X-SAMPA and Kirschenbaum versions of IPA :)

Polite struggles, in retrospect; the internet was different back then, and the nerdbro was not yet an icon.
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