To write or not to write

Permalink: http://sites.google.com/site/sarvabhashin/articles/to-write-or-not-to-write

I bumped into the Romany (Gypsy) language version of Wikipedia (http://rmy.wikipedia.org/) and saw the efforts to develop a writing system for this previously unwritten language. While most of the efforts at standardising a script seem to be targeted at developing a Latin script version, the Wikipedia employs a Devanagari equivalent as well, with the same content being displayed in both scripts on each page.

While this is an interesting idea, the reason behind which however is not yet known to me (though I presume it’s due to Romany being a South Asian language, so Devanagari being the ‘logical’ script for it), it seemed to me after reading a few pages (just reading, not understanding) that the Roman script served the purpose better than Devanagari for this language.

Of course, this is not to say that Devanagari cannot be a wonderfully phonetic script as well for this language, with the addition of just a few modifications (for example, modified letters to represent the /ts/ and /ʒ/ sounds). But in the present day scenario, I can’t help thinking that the Latin script would add to the spread of the language in a world where the Latin script is already the most widespread. Many widely spoken languages which are traditionally written in a non-Latin script have a Latin script equivalent as well -

Pinyin for Mandarin Chinese

Romaji for Japanese

RR for Korean

and some not-so-widely spoken languages too -

Dhivehi Latin for Divehi (Maldivian)

Arabic and Russian are two notable exceptions in not having one standard, widely accepted latinisation scheme.

It seems that it makes a lot of sense to have an official Latin script version for languages that do not have a script as yet, or for those which are written in another script.

Personally, I feel that the absence of such a Latin script equivalent for Indian languages like Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Tamil, as well as for Persian, has been a major hindrance in attracting learners. Learners of Mandarin Chinese and Japanese are not faced with the daunting task of having to learn to read and write all over again in a new script before they can actually begin learning to speak the language. With ad-hoc and non-phonetic transcriptions being used in learners’ books for Indian and Iranian languages, learners have no choice but to learn the native scripts for the language if they want to start pronouncing it correctly.

Like the speakers of Romany, I too come from a community which speaks a language that has no written tradition, though we have been very well versed in languages (Kannada, Tamil) geographically close to where our community was based. I wish to create a Latin script equivalent of our native tongue, whose grammar is based on Tamil and vocabulary largely on Tamil and to a lesser extent, Kannada. While the Latin script makes sense due to all the reasons outlined above, it also seems appropriate to have a Kannada script and Tamil script equivalent due to our community’s historical link to these languages. A dictionary yet in its infancy can be found here, with transcriptions of words in Latin (Roman), Kannada and Tamil scripts, along with the IPA pronunciation.

Interestingly, many ‘minority’ Chinese languages, with speaker bases running into the millions, have also developed Latin-based scripts, such as Southern Min, Eastern Min, Zhuang and Hakka. Other languages like Cantonese have Latin-based transcriptions (“romanisations”), similar to Pinyin, in addition to traditional logographic scripts.

Updated: 2009-01-10