Wiktionary talk:Khanty transliteration

Notes on adjustments

• ISO 9 takes its value for ә mainly from Turkish languages like Kazakh, where it represents /æ/. Khanty however uses ӓ for /æ/.
• I am not sure if iotization = circumflexes is a very useful convention here, but if we're going along with it, then by symmetry we clearly also ought to have ӛ > ə̂.
• ӆ is /ɬ/, which is not at all well transcribed as ḷ. I've changed this to ł (IPA ɬ has the problem of not having an uppercase variant). Explicit references for ԓ are difficult to find, but this seems to leave only /ɭ/ as an option.

Cf. http://www.babel.gwi.uni-muenchen.de/index.php?abfrage=transcript --Tropylium (talk) 01:57, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

Isn't there an established scholarly transliteration scheme for Khanty that we have to invent our own system? --Vahag (talk) 09:09, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

There is no one established scheme that could be unambiguously picked. As my link above notes:

Linguists dealing with Mansi or Khanty have traditionally used varying systems to record Mansi and Khanty words and texts in writing. Until recent times this meant employing a form of the Finno-Ugric transcription system (FUT). Earlier researchers regularly used their own individual and partially highly idiosyncratic and phonetic systems (…) but in the second half of the 20th century a more unified and phonematic form of the FUT came into use. Recent decades have also seen the advent of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in Mansi and Khanty linguistics.

This is further compounded by the high amount of dialectal variation in Khanty. The Cyrillic orthography attempts to cover all varieties of both Northern and Eastern Khanty, and Wiktionary's choice to treat Khanty as a single language requires us to also put together a compromise transliteration covering both extant dialect groups at the same time.

Another problem entirely is that all existing Latin-alphabet schemes are transcriptions (of the pronunciation of Khanty) and not transliterations (of the Cyrillic orthography). The Cyrillic orthography is itself sufficiently unstandardized that I believe no one has cared about devising a standard transliteration of it specifically. --Tropylium (talk) 09:51, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

Then feel free to develop a Wiktionary-specific system, as long as it is documented on WT:KCA TR. --Vahag (talk) 10:05, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

ԓ

Most of our current Khanty entries actually seem to use ԓ for /ɬ/. I will check if Kononova's dictionary, where these are apparently mainly sourced from, really does this (well possible, the Khanty orthography is anything but standardized) — or if someone has misread ӆ. --Tropylium (talk) 02:09, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

This checks out: Kononova in fact only uses ӆ, though written in a font where the descender resembles a cedilla (and hence easily confusable with ԓ. --Tropylium (talk) 13:07, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

We do not have a serious Khanty contributor yet and I do not know anything about ӆ. You seem to know your way around Uralic languages. Please be bold and develop best practices yourself. --Vahag (talk) 14:21, 19 November 2014 (UTC)