Transliterations “in the wild” and made up by others question

[squee333]

http://www.hebrewworks.com/

This program allows me to choose which Latin characters to use to represent the Hebrew ones, on a sound-by-sound basis. Do the resulting transliterations of complete words count as having been seen "in the wild" and made up by someone other than the person setting the equivalencies?

[aokoye]

I think I asked you this before (and i don't think you answered), but what is this "seen in the wild" requirement that you're after and what are you trying to compile? Why do you need the in the wild part? Also realize that there are multiple transliterations based on who the intended readers are. This is both based on the assumed L1 of the reader and at least in terms of US based publishers, whether or not someone is using the Ashkenazi or the Sephardi pronunciation, among others. An example of this, from the publisher's side, is here (note the options under "nusah")

[Cainntear]

If you need sources to cite, asking random people on the internet to invent systems for you is not really any better than inventing those systems yourself.

[Deinonysus]

I don't understand exactly what you're trying to accomplish here or with your earlier Yiddish transliteration thread.

If you want to Romanize Hebrew and Yiddish based on current practices, just choose an established Romanization system.

If you try to base an original Romanization system based on current practices without any regard for multiple competing systems, you'll end up with an internally inconsistent mishmash that is worse than any existing system.

If you think the current Romanization systems are inadequate and want to create an original system that's better than what's currently used, then research what goes into a good Romanization system, choose good design goals, and test out your new completed system.

If you are unsure of where to start with your Romanization system, Wikipedia seems to have some high-quality articles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Hebrew

[Doitsujin]

Do the resulting transliterations of complete words count as having been seen "in the wild" and made up by someone other than the person setting the equivalencies?

Most transliteration systems for non-Latin alphabets were introduced at a time when it was very difficult to print characters in non-Latin alphabets or store them in a database. The introduction and widespread adoption of the Unicode standard made them pretty much superfluous. Nowadays, they're only needed for textbooks for beginners and scientific papers for linguists familiar with the grammar but not the writing systems of languages that use non-Latin alphabets.

Also you shouldn't forget that most systems were originally designed to allow the reader to accurately restore the actual letters, regardless of the pronunciation.

You might think that you've somehow come up with a superior transliteration system, however, I'm pretty sure that nobody will adopt it, unless several peer-reviewed studies come to the conclusion that your system is actually better or it's used by a very popular Open Source NLP program.
For example, many Arabic NLP programs internally use the Buckwalter Morphological Analyzer, which uses a horrible transliteration system. As a result, many Arabic NLP tools still support this transliteration system, but it's hardly used in scientific papers.

[squee333]

I think I asked you this before (and i don't think you answered), but what is this "seen in the wild" requirement that you're after and what are you trying to compile? Why do you need the in the wild part? Also realize that there are multiple transliterations based on who the intended readers are. This is both based on the assumed L1 of the reader and at least in terms of US based publishers, whether or not someone is using the Ashkenazi or the Sephardi pronunciation, among others. An example of this, from the publisher's side, is here (note the options under "nusah")

In the wild: "In the field. In the actual world / real life rather than in theory" (Urban Dictionary). Apparently computer-generated transliterations don't count, but would composites of human-generated transliterations (i.e. making a word out of the transliterations of its component graphemes)?

[Doitsujin]

In the wild: "In the field. In the actual world / real life rather than in theory" (Urban Dictionary). Apparently computer-generated transliterations don't count, but would composites of human-generated transliterations (i.e. making a word out of the transliterations of its component graphemes)?

IMHO, you're still missing the point. In order for a transliteration to be considered "in the wild" someone other than you has to actually use it.

[Iversen]

I'm with Doitsujin on most points here, although with a few exceptions which I only expect to use in my own writings - I don't expect them to be adopted universally. They don't concern Hebrew (which I don't study) but languages with a Cyrillic alphabet like Russian or Greek with its own alphabet (in the revised version).

For instance I don't like the -sky on Russian names because it purports to render the ending -ский.The logical choice here is to write -ij in English, but nobody except me seems to do so. In my opinion the English letter y should be reserved for the Russian digraph ы (which isn't used after к), but I don't expect the whole Anglophone world suddenly to come to its senses.

[aokoye]

I think I asked you this before (and i don't think you answered), but what is this "seen in the wild" requirement that you're after and what are you trying to compile? Why do you need the in the wild part? Also realize that there are multiple transliterations based on who the intended readers are. This is both based on the assumed L1 of the reader and at least in terms of US based publishers, whether or not someone is using the Ashkenazi or the Sephardi pronunciation, among others. An example of this, from the publisher's side, is here (note the options under "nusah")

In the wild: "In the field. In the actual world / real life rather than in theory" (Urban Dictionary). Apparently computer-generated transliterations don't count, but would composites of human-generated transliterations (i.e. making a word out of the transliterations of its component graphemes)?

Honestly, outside of people who don't read Hebrew very fluently (which is to say, not being able to decode words easily), transliteration isn't frequently used. I would be able to give you better advice if I actually knew what your end goal was, but my gut is saying just get a siddur (that has transliteration) or two and see how words are being transliterated. That's the only place you'll really see transliteration used "in the wild". That and sites that are specifically focused on Jewish prayers - My Jewish Learning, Chabad (you'll have to search for transliterations there but they exist), and Wikipedia pages on Jewish prayers are examples.

Honestly, it would serve you better to not be as cryptic as you have been about what you need and why. I suspect that I or others could have helped you when you first posted about this and I could actually probably be more helpful now if I knew what your goal was.