ABSTRACT
As I understand the matter, transliteration and transcription are entirely different processes. Transliteration is the substitution of the letters or signs of one alphabet for those of another, in the case of Turkish usually the substitution of letters of the Latin or Cyrillic alphabets, with the addition of modified letters, for the letters and vowel signs of one of the alphabets enumerated in Chapter V. The purpose of transliteration may be no more than to make it possible to print the whole of an article in congruous type founts and so avoid the expense of printing with mixed founts, without depriving the reader of the possibility of knowing exactly the form of the original text in the other alphabet. Alternatively it may be, so to speak, to reduce to a common denominator a set of extracts from texts written in different alphabets. In almost every alphabet, certainly in all the alphabets enumerated in Chapter V, some of the letters used are really polyphonic, that is represent more than one sound. And so even before he begins his work the transliterator must formulate a whole series of stated or unstated conventions, some of which are, phonetically speaking, misleading. Thus he may, for example, decide to use Latin b to represent the Arabic letter bā, which would probably be correct if he were transcribing an Arabic text but would quite often represent the wrong sound if he were transcribing Turkish or Persian. Thus the transliterator must model himself on the legendary Hong Kong tailor who, given a roll of cloth and an old suit to copy, produced so faithful a copy that it reproduced all the tears, stains and abrasions of the original.
