Talk:BGN/PCGN romanization

Capitalization

My Canadian Oxford Dictionary (2nd ed., 2004) has an un-capitalized headword "romanization", and this is the way I've been using it in Wikipedia articles. The word is not a proper noun itself, and is already removed from anything Roman, and I assume that other Oxford dictionaries probably follow the same convention (although it looks like the 2000 American Heritage dictionary disagrees). The dictionary does capitalize "Latinize", "-ation", probably because of its closer connection to the proper noun "Latin alphabet". —Michael Z. 2006-02-14 18:49 Z

The New Oxford American Dictionary 2nd ed. built into my Mac OS has the headword "romanize", with capitalized "Romanize" as an alternate version. —Michael Z. 2006-02-14 19:10 Z

Not that I enjoy putting burden on someone else's shoulders, but I guess since you are the native speaker, it's up to you to decide how to capitalize this word properly :) I have no preference either way, and I can't recall an appropriate WP guideline off the top of my head, especially considering the fact that dictionaries disagree. Just so you know, Word spellchecker offers to capitalize the word, but that, of course, hardly helps much.—Ëzhiki (ërinacëus amurënsis) 19:09, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

Well, if the lower-case word is fine, perhaps that's what we should use. That way it'll match the MoS capitalization guidelines. What do you think?—Ëzhiki (ërinacëus amurënsis) 19:14, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

No burden—I don't mind deciding for everybody :). By the way, how does the BGN/PCGN publication capitalize the word romanize, -ization when it is not part of a title? —Michael Z. 2006-02-14 19:15 Z

Ah, busted at last :) As for your question, BGN/PCGN folks use lower case for all cases.—Ëzhiki (ërinacëus amurënsis) 19:20, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

I'll move the article back; hope you don't mind. —Michael Z. 2006-02-14 19:37 Z

Cyrillic overview

Okay. Wow, that's an impressive list when you link them all in one article. How about an über-overview article, BGN/PCGN romanization of Cyrillic, with one or two tables similar to the one in scientific transliteration?. —Michael Z. 2006-02-14 18:51 Z

That'll probably work, although creating an hierarchical structure of all romanization-related articles for personal reference already gave me a headache :) How do you envision links between this article, BGN/PCGN romanization of Cyrillic, and BGN/PCGN romanization of "LangName" series (where "LangName" is the name of any language covered by BGN/PCGN, not necessarily using the Cyrillic alphabet)?—Ëzhiki (ërinacëus amurënsis) 19:09, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

Well, one step at a time. I think the Cyrillic article would at least link back to this main article, and could link to articles for the individual Cyrillic romanizations from the table headings. —Michael Z. 2006-02-14 19:12 Z

List format

The list looks scary with all those red links at the start of each entry. I was kind of hoping that may be you (Michael) would rework it into a table—it would look nicer. I guess my hint was way too subtle :) Not that it's important now, but maybe sometime later you'll find time for that? The list is hard to read no matter how you turn it; the only reason I made it into the list at all was because it was the easiest for the article mock-up.—Ëzhiki (ërinacëus amurënsis) 20:00, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

I'll leave it as a list for now. The red links don't seem quite right: they all look like they point to the same "Romanization" article. Maybe a table with the full article titles ("BGN/PCGN Romanization of Amharic", etc.) is the right way to go, but then there'll be an even bigger mass of red on the page. Requires a bit of thought.

I think BGN/PCGN romanization of Russian could be started with the big table from romanization of Russian. —Michael Z. 2006-02-14 20:22 Z

Yup, that's what I'm working on right now. Hopefully we are not duplicating efforts. As for formatting, that can certainly wait.—Ëzhiki (ërinacëus amurënsis) 20:24, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

OK, done. Apart from the table, there is surprisingly little to be said.—Ëzhiki (ërinacëus amurënsis) 20:37, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

New edition available

There is a new edition available at http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/romanization.html under the title Romanization Systems and Policies. It doesn't seem to be available in printed form yet, but the online edition “supersedes the Transliteration Guide of 1961, the Romanization Guide of 1964, 1967, 1972, and the publication Romanization Systems and Roman Script Spelling Conventions of 1994”. Are there any objections to update the article accordingly? --Entlinkt (talk) 06:53, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

It would be good to make a note of significant changes, since the older versions will continue to be in use for a while. From that page, it looks like most of the individual-language systems are not being updated. —Michael Z. 2008-06-03 13:02 z

The following table shows the changes. It may not be entirely accurate because I mostly looked at the titles of the individual tables and didn't check the whole content yet. In some cases, the introductory notes to the individual tables changed, but the title did not.

So it seems that Greek (ELOT 743) is the only language that got a romanization radically different from what it had before. All other changes are marked as “Revision” (Pashto, Thai) or just the name changed (Serbocroatian/Serbian) or consist of adoption of the locally adopted Latin script (Turkmen, Uzbek) or spelling reform (German) or new languages that were not covered at all by the 1994 edition. --Entlinkt (talk) 21:43, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Language	1994 print edition	Current online edition	Changes
Amharic	BGN/PCGN 1967 System	BGN/PCGN 1967 System	-
Arabic	BGN/PCGN 1956 System	BGN/PCGN 1956 System	-
Armenian	BGN/PCGN 1981 System	BGN/PCGN 1981 System	-
Azerbaijani Cyrillic	BGN/PCGN 1993 Agreement	BGN/PCGN 1993 Agreement	-
Bashkir	-	?	New, not yet available online.
Bulgarian	BGN/PCGN 1952 System	BGN/PCGN 1952 System	-
Burmese	BGN/PCGN 1970 System	BGN/PCGN 1970 Agreement	-
Byelorussian	BGN/PCGN 1979 System	BGN/PCGN 1979 System	-
Chechen	-	?	New, not yet available online.
Chinese characters	BGN/PCGN 1979 Agreement	BGN/PCGN 1979 Agreement	-
Georgian	BGN/PCGN 1981 System	BGN/PCGN 1981 System	-
Greek	BGN/PCGN 1962 System	BGN/PCGN 1996 Agreement	Adopted ELOT 743.
Hebrew	BGN/PCGN 1962 System	BGN/PCGN 1962 Agreement	-
Japanese kana	BGN/PCGN Agreement	BGN/PCGN 1976 Agreement	-
Kazakh Cyrillic	BGN/PCGN 1979 System	BGN/PCGN 1979 System	-
Khmer (Cambodian)	BGN/PCGN 1972 System	BGN/PCGN 1972 Agreement	-
Kirghiz Cyrillic	BGN/PCGN 1979 System	BGN/PCGN 1979 System	-
Korean	BGN/PCGN Agreement	BGN/PCGN 1945 Agreement	-
Kurdish	-	?	New, not yet available online.
Lao	BGN/PCGN 1966 System	BGN/PCGN 1966 Agreement	-
Macedonian	BGN/PCGN 1981 System	BGN/PCGN 1981 Agreement	-
Maldivian	BGN/PCGN 1988 System	BGN/PCGN 1988 Agreement	-
Moldovan (Moldavian) Cyrillic	-	BGN/PCGN 2002 Agreement	New.
Mongolian Cyrillic	BGN/PCGN 1964 System	BGN/PCGN 1964 System	-
Nepali	BGN/PCGN 1964 System	BGN/PCGN 1964 System	-
Pashto	BGN/PCGN 1968 System	BGN/PCGN 1968 System, 2006 Revision	Revision.
Persian	BGN/PCGN 1958 System	BGN/PCGN 1958 System	-
Russian	BGN/PCGN 1947 System	BGN/PCGN 1947 System	-
Serbocroatian/Serbian Cyrillic	BGN/PCGN Agreement	BGN/PCGN 2005 Agreement	Renamed from “Serbocroatian” to “Serbian”.
Tajik	-	BGN/PCGN 1994 System	New.
Tatar	-	BGN/PCGN 2007 Agreement	New.
Thai	BGN/PCGN 1970 System	BGN/PCGN 2002 Agreement	Revision.
Tigrinya	-	BGN/PCGN 2007 System	New.
Turkmen	BGN/PCGN 1979 System	BGN/PCGN 2000 Agreement	Adopted Latin script.
Ukrainian	BGN/PCGN 1965 System	BGN/PCGN 1965 System	-
Urdu	-	BGN/PCGN 2007 System	New.
Uzbek	BGN/PCGN 1979 System	BGN/PCGN 2000 Agreement	Adopted Latin script.
Faroese	BGN/PCGN 1968 Agreement	BGN/PCGN 1968 Agreement	-
German	BGN/PCGN 1986 Agreement	BGN/PCGN 2000 Agreement	Adopted spelling reform.
Icelandic	BGN/PCGN 1968 Agreement	BGN/PCGN 1968 Agreement	-
North Lappish	BGN/PCGN 1984 Agreement	BGN/PCGN 1984 Agreement	-

Even newer edition available

There have been substantial changes to Romanization Systems and Policies at http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/romanization.html as of November 2012. I have indicated this in the article, and have made a partial quick update of the more straightforward entries in the big list. But further updates are needed to conform to the latest edition. --Cimbalom (talk) 04:19, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Done. Burzuchius (talk) 16:55, 28 February 2013 (UTC)

BGN/PCGN - Armenian

I have noticed BGN/PCGN romanization of Armenian redirects to Romanization of Armenian. That is simply unacceptable. I will arrange it in a manner appropriate to the Wikipedia standard. --92slim (talk) 17:03, 4 March 2015 (UTC)