THE TRANSLITERATION OF ORIENTAL LANGUAGES I N CHEMICAL LITERATURE' JOHN L. MISH New York Public Library, New York, N. Y.
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THE numerous lauguages of Asia with their vast and ancient literatures only three need concern us, because only in them is there any considerable amount of chemical writing. They are, in order of importance, Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic. I need not dwell here upon the great contribution of Japanese scientists to the progress of chemistry within the last 50 years; any reader of Chemical Abstracts is well aware of that. The chemist and the chemical librarian are confronted mainly by three problems when dealing with .Japanese material. (1) First is the question of transliteratiou proper. This used to be very simple up to about 30 years ago, because both the Japanese themselves and the entire Germanic-speaking world (the United States, the British Commonwealth, Germany, Holland, and Scandinavia) used the so-called Hepburn system, in which, roughly speaking, the consonants are to be pronounced as in English and the vowels as in Italian. This is still the only system used in the above mentioned countries outside Japan. It is obligatory in the United States and Britain for libraries and for scientific as well as popular publications. I may dispense with examples here, since any glance a t a daily newspaper shows enough Japanese names thus transliterated. Only one remark is necessary here: The length of a vowel is indicated by a dash over it, but, as this is inconvenient for typing, a circumflex is very often used instead. The real difficulty lies in the fact that the Japanese themselves have been using, for about 30 years now, another system of romanization which appears quite often in their ow11 English summaries and titles. They claim that this system is better adapted to render their own syllabic alphabet. For practical purposes, the main differences are these: ch, sh, and j before vowels other than i are written ty, sy, and zy; before i,only t, s, and z. The syllable tsu is written tu, and fu as hu. Thus, the common surname Fujiwara appears as Huziwara -which does look quite different. Our libraries and most scientific publications ignore this system altogether and retransliterate according to t,he Hepburn system. (2) Formerly most Japanese journals had English subtitles, and all of them are commonly cited to this day by these English titles only. By now, however, many of them have dropped the English subtitles altogether and have often changed the original Japanese 1 Presented before the Division of Chemical Literature at the 126th Meeting of the American Chemical Society, New York, September, 1954.
titles as well. This naturally leads to confusion. Most libraries have, therefore, adopted the system of cataloguing in principle by the Japanese title only, with a h many cross references as necessary for the English, or former .Japanese, title. Thus, the Chemical Journal now appears as Nippon Kagaku Zasshi. (3) You were told a t your meeting in 1952 what may happen when foreign names are transliterated into Russian, and then have to be retransliterated into English. The same difficulty, increased tenfold, exists in Japanese, and in many cases it is downright impossible to guess what name or word is meant. To give a few examples: reburan sodaho is Leblanc soda process; reuogurokosan is levoglucosan; chioarukoru is thioalcohol; etc. The reason is that Japanese does not know consonant clusters, nor the sound of 1, so that the amount of phonetically possible syllables is very limited. Similar difficulties beset the chemist when he has to deal with Chinese. The system of transliteration adopted here is the modified Wade-Giles system, exemplified by most dictionaries now in print. The principle here is the same as for Japanese, uiz., consonants as in English, vowels as in Italian. However, as Chinese phonetics are very difficult indeed, any system of transliteration is not even an approximation to the real pronunciation, but a series of conventional signs whose real meaning has to be learned specially. Suffice it to say here that the apostrophes after k , p, and t are essential, because without them these letters are pronounced g, b, and d . Essential also is the umlaut on u, because, for example, yu and yu are two entirely different sounds and words. Rut the real bane of Chinese transliteration is the custom of many Chinese authors of using the dialect pronunciation of their names rather than the standardized "national Ianguage" or kuo-y*. Thus, no one but a sinologist could possible know that Mr. Wong Yat-lok is the same man as Mr. Huang I-lu! The Chinese ideograms are, of course, identical in both eases. Our libraries ignore dialectical variants completely, using only the standardized reading. I n the rase of well known persons, a cross reference is made; e. g., "Sun Yat-sen, see Sun I-hsien." It must be remembered that both the Japanese and the Chinese put the family name first, although, to add to the confusion many authors use the western word order now when writing in English. What was said about the transliteration of foreign names into Japanese is still worse in Chinese, owing to the stiIl greater phonetic limitations of that mono-
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syllabic language. So k'o szu lo t'e for "Soxhlet" is but a mild example! The Chinese themselves are aware of this and often add the name in its original spelling. We now come to the last and, as yet, least important Oriental language in chemical literature, namely, Arabic. Here the difficulties are mainly twofold; first, the chaotic condition in the field of transliteration proper, and second, the lack of family names in most Arabic countries. There is no uniform system of romanizing Arabic yet, thongh our Library of Congress has adopted one which is now used by most libraries in this country. Unfortunately, it has proved impossible to do without llumerous diacritical points in that language and, in addition, most Arabs prefer the phonetical rendering according to their local dialect to the standard pronunciation of written literary Arabic. The diacritical points
JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL EDUCATION
can be ignored for chemical purposes, but it is disconcerting when the standard name of Abd Allah Fauki, for instance, appears as Ahdoullah Fowky on the title page. If the author does not write in his mother tongue it is usual to spell his name as he spells it himself; hut if the name is given in the original Arabic a uniform transliteration will have to be applied. Foreign names in Arahic also present a problem because this language does not n-rite short vowels a t all, and even in the case of the long ones cannot distinguish e from i, nor o from u. Yet this is not half so bad as the above mentioned difficulties in Chinese and Japanese. In conclusion, let me say here that the main guideposts for the transliteration of Oriental languages in chemical literature should be uniformity and clarity; philological niceties have no place there.
