This study investigates the effect of Facebook on Arabic language attrition, i.e., decrease in language proficiency, as exhibited in the use of Colloquial instead of Standard Arabic, use of foreign words although Arabic equivalents exist, and committing spelling errors. A sample of Facebook posts and a corpus of spelling errors on Facebook were…

Documents in non-Roman scripts now constitute a sizeable part of world production, and their bibliographic control through Romanization is beset by many problems. Among these are the impossibility to simultaneously satisfy certain functional requirements, the multiplicity of schemes and their inconsistent use, and the susceptibility of the method…

The history of lexicography in Vietnam is chronicled from early Chinese and missionary scholarship through the colonial period (1884-1946), the war years (1946-1954), the partition period (1954-1975), and the post-1975 period. The evolution of romanization, political-linguistic influences, native scholarship in lexicography, and dictionary types…

Efforts by Canada Natives to put their languages into standard written formats and to use Native languages with their children are discussed in this review of the Stoney Indian Language Project. The Stoney community is centered at Morley, Alberta (Canada), and the population of the three bands--Bear's Paw, Chiniki, and Goodstoney--is nearly 2,700.…

The traditional theory of Chinese writing is that it is divorced from the language because as a non-alphabetic system, it cannot represent real speech. Chinese writing, however, is a functional linguistic system in its own right. Writing does not need to be totally dependent on speech, but can be related either to the phonological or the semantic…

Script reform, the modification of an existing writing system, is often confused with script replacement of one writing system with another. Turkish underwent the replacement of Arabic script by an adaptation of Roman script under Kamel Ataturk, but a similar replacement in Persian was rejected because of the high rate of existing literacy in…

The 1986 report by the Canadian Task Force on Aboriginal Languages, which recommended that the writing systems used for the northern Dene languages be standardized within 10 years, resulted in the 1987 Dene Standardization Project. The mandate for the project was to make recommendations on orthography standardization as the first step in the…

This paper challenges from a practical point of view the idea that the phonemic principle is the most adequate or the optimal theoretical basis for devising a romanized alphabet for a language. In the past, romanization of languages, written or unwritten, have largely been based on the phonemic principle and have unnecessarily burdened the learner…

This paper explores the background history and sources of the Afghanistan collection at the University Library, University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO). Credit for the impetus behind the development of the collection is given to Chris Jung, a former UNO geography/geology faculty member; Ronald Roskens, then UNO chancellor; and the Afghanistan…

Problems in the translation of Judeo-Spanish texts go beyond the problems normally associated with translation. Aside from near-native control of two languages, the translator must have knowledge of vocabulary that is not completely Spanish and an understanding of the unique orthographic history of the Judeo-Spanish dialect. There are Spanish…

This paper explores the range of arguments and sentiments regarding the promotion and/or abolition of types of Chinese scripts. The written representations of Cantonese in Hong Kong, Mandarin in Taiwan as well as Mandarin in China are examined via issues of identity and of discourse both at national and international levels. Chinese scripts are…

The construction of an intermediate course in Mandarin Chinese for business purposes is discussed. Following an introduction in part one, part two considers the progress of trade relations between Taiwan, the People's Republic of China (PRC), and the United States. Part three gives a brief review of materials already in print that might help in…