CZ:Romanization

The Citizendium will sometimes require that words not normally written using the English alphabet appear in articles in a form that readers unfamiliar with the original languages will understand. Where words are transliterated from one script to the Latin (Roman) alphabet, this is known as 'romanization'.

However, in many cases there are several competing standards for writing the language in romanized form; for example, there are two major ways of romanizing Japanese. Even within prescribed romanization methods, there may be variations in spelling and style. To take just one example, the Japanese word for a small police station (交番 or こうばん) could be written kouban, kōban, kooban or koban - four versions in the same 'Hepburn' romanization system. Other languages such as Chinese Hanzi script are even more complicated with dozens of competing romanization methods covering a large variety of dialects of Chinese. If individual authors are allowed to choose the form of Romanization independantly then we will quickly end up with a mess. If one article talks about Guizhou (a province of China), another article mentions Kweichow, and a thrid article discusses Kwei-chow, then the reader will be confused and left wondering if these are all different places or really the same place. A common standard for of romanization is required throughout all Citizendium articles.

This page provides links to discussion of which standards to use when romanizing foreign words on the Citizendium. Once agreement is reached, these decisions will form policy.

Modern Languages

Please add titles and language links below as necessary and start discussion on the new pages.

East Asian languages

• Japanese
• Chinese
• Korean

Ancient Languages

• Ancient Greek
• Sanskrit

Also see

• CZ:Pronunciation guides
• CZ:Translation

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