Template talk:uxi

Substitutions for Arabic?
Hi. Would substitutions also work for Arabic? For example, pls see. I'd like to transliterate as "wa-marratan" (with a hyphen). Of course, there's also a need to transliterate irregular readings, e.g. and tāʾ marbūṭa in various positions. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 11:19, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Substitutions would probably work here. You might need to have trsubst= implemented to do substitutions after transliteration for many cases. Benwing2 (talk) 04:43, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
 * @Benwing2, sorry, again. Could you or anyone please suggest how to use |subst= to make "faʾasraʿa" -> "fa-ʾasraʿa" and "wamašā" -> "wa-mašā" in the following example? The Arabic words to be split by a hyphen are and .  --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 09:09, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Like this: . --WikiTiki89 16:53, 26 June 2017 (UTC)

Russian Latin transcription of soft consonants
As it stands, the Latin transcription of Russian is not only inconsistent with soft consonants, but it is also confusing and unintuitive. Here is the full table of how the current transcription addresses soft and hard consonants in conjunction with all the 5 vowel sounds as well as otherwise:

So the general pattern seems to be to mark softness by adding the letter j directly after the consonant when it is followed by a vowel and to add an apostrophe (') if it is not. Already, I don't see why we need this overcomplication and can't instead go for the apostrophe every time, like in Slovak, but okay, at least this distinction is present in languages like Polish. However, what I really have a problem with is why we need to go for the letter j, which is the exact same letter that is used to transcribe letters like й and the first part of soft vowels (when they are in their compound sound form), so that e.g. and  are transcribed identically, and that the meaning of two consecutive apostrophes representing the hard sign, which almost all readers who aren't versed in the Slavic script will have no clue of, becomes necessary for words which have it (e.g. ) to be pronounced correctly. Moreover, such an incredibly confusing (and often misleading) transcription system, to my knowledge, is not used in any natural Slavic language, which makes its inclusion all the harder to justify. Even we for some reason wanted to leave the distinction between soft consonants which are followed by vowels and those which are not, we could simply use the letter i to mark softness. This would sort of avoid the aforementioned problems, as nominal diphthongs such as иа (when the и is unstressed) tend to merge into я, anyway (e.g. вариант, биография), and has the added benefit of being employed in the second most widely spoken Slavic language, Polish. Either of the suggested transcription systems would be better than the current one, although, for obvious reasons, a consistent apostrophe would have my vote.

But then there is also the fact that even this confusing general pattern is not always followed: while the exception of и and ы is not only understandable but is the only justifiable solution, as most linguists agree that the two are distinct phonemes, the exception of transcribing soft е as e and hard e/э as ɛ (instead of je and e, if we follow the pattern) seems incredibly arbitrary and is not present in the Latin transcription of Belarusian, for example. It also has the practical disadvantage of misleading the reader into thinking that e.g. не is pronounced similarly to Serbo-Croatian ne, which is of course not the case.

There are a few other issues that I have with the current method of transcription, such as the transcription of х as x and ё as jo instead of jë/ië, but let's just get this obvious flaw out of the way first and then move on to less obvious issues.

To sum up my proposed solution, here is the proposed table of transcription of soft/hard consonants: YourAverageMax (talk) 18:13, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Can this template be used in usage notes?
Is it okay to use this template in usage notes? (I have been avoiding it so far, because the template says to use it in the definition section.) If not, is there any other equivalent? 70.175.192.217 01:53, 17 September 2021 (UTC)