#romanization

[apttalbalik]

[or-what-you-will]

What is a "daroga"?

In the late 19th century, Persian orthography was not yet standardized, and there was no standard romanization from the Persian alphabet to languages that use roman characters like French or English. When Leroux wrote Phantom, he would have had to make up his own romanization of the word داروغه based on the sounds in the word or use one from an existing dictionary.

This means that when you google the term “daroga” today, it’s often difficult to find more information about it, and often what does come up is about India or Mongolia. The word did come from Mongolian, but it was also very much used in the Persian empire. Today, there are different ways of spelling the word that better reflect the pronunciation in Persian. On top of this, romanizations often differ depending on which language you are using the word in, as different languages pronounce vowels differently.

An example from a Persian-French dictionary from the late 1800s romanizing and translating “daroga” into French. In English, the romanizations “darugha” and “darougheh” are a bit more common today when referencing "daroga" in the context of Persia or Iran. These romanizations help keep the vowel sound for و as “oo” rather than “oh” which is closer to its proper pronunciation.

IPA: [d̪ɒːɾuːˈɣe]

They functioned as more than just the chief of police. Depending on the city and time period, their roles varied. They were in charge of managing the bazaar (central market), catching thieves and punishing them, making sure that the vendors didn’t sell illegal goods, in some cases also levying taxes, and serving as a sort of mayoral figure. They also managed guards who would keep watch over palaces and the bazaar at night.

By the time the Qajar era came around (1789-1925), the role of “daroga” was greatly diminished. They had reputations for being corrupt and collecting money for their own benefits, and a lot of their duties were distributed among other officials. At the end of the 19th century, they were pretty much obsolete, as the shah sought to modernize, and eventually created a more westernized police force to replace the old system.

You can find more information in the following places:

Fiveable - a short list of basic facts

Encyclopaedia Iranica - in depth exploration of the organization of Persian cities throughout history (this site is a high quality resource for finding information on the history of Persia in English)

Sheriff`s position in Qajar era (1796-1896) - academic article discussing the role of the "daroga" in the Qajar era specifically (article in Persian only)

[binnybinnychickendinny]

i actually think daily about the fleury/binner almost-fight bc. okay so obviously the consensus among every nhl fan ever is that they should've been allowed to fight right lmao. but what i think most people do not realize is that allegedly the fight was planned. from before the game even started. because binner and fleury have a friend or trainer in common or something? and binner knew getting into a fight was on fleury's bucket list and he was like "sure man i'll get into it with you if there's an opportunity" and then he saw fleury skating down the ice and was like "oh yeah okay let's go" and then the refs wouldn't let them. like everyone looks at it as "oh just jordan binnington being jordan binnington and fleury was going to kill him about it" and there's definitely a LITTLE of that but they also both wanted to get into a fight just for the hell of it LMAO. i totally understand why fleury didn't share that with the reporters immediately afterwards (and neither did binner, this is from an interview he did that i assume most people have not seen) but it is funny to me that the surrounding context is less "binnington being insane and fleury being the saint that he is deciding to fight him in that moment" and more "binnington being completely willing from the start to get into a homoerotic goalie fight just bc fleury wants to"

[paizau]

someday I'll make an orthography where <ð> is as fucked up as it is in Faroese and it will be glorious

[jinkaosgengo]

Òtpoetti̖ Post #6: Phonology

This post will detail the phonology and function as an update to my first post about Òtpoetti̖, which contained some information about the phonology. The Òtpoetti̖ phonology is continuously evolving as I add new words, so this may not be the final phonology update I do.

Phonemes & Romanization

/m mː n nː ɲ ŋ p pː pːʷ b t tː d t͡s t͡ʃ t͡ʃː k kː kʲ kʼ kʲʼ ɡ ʔ ɸ v vː s ʃ h j l r ɾ/

⟨m mm n nn nj ng p pp pw b t tt d z c cc k kk q k’ q’ g x f v vv s sj h y l rr r⟩

/i iː e eː ɛ ɛː u uː o oː a aː/

⟨i ii e ee æ ææ u uu o oo a aa⟩

/a̤ a̰ a³ a² a¹ a³¹ a³² a²³ a²¹ a¹²/

⟨ah a’ ā a a̱ à a̖ â á a̗⟩

Tone 3: high tone, tone 2: mid tone, tone 1: low tone, and combinations of those are contour tones.

All vowels have some tone. Length can combine with phonation, but phonations cannot combine with each other.

A vowel marked with a diaerisis is a tone-2 vowel in a separate syllable from the previous vowel or previous ⟨h⟩.

Allophony

Long creaky vowels /V̰ː/ have a brief glottal stop in the middle [V̰ˀV̰].

A tone-2 vowel becomes voiceless between two voiceless consonants.

Open central vowels /a/ become open back vowels [ɑ] after velar consonants /ŋ k kʼ ɡ/.

/h/ becomes [x] before back vowels /u o/.

/t͡ʃ t͡ʃː ʃ h/ become [t͡ɕ t͡ɕː ɕ ç] before the close front vowels /i/.

Coda /n/ assimilates to the place of articulation of a following plosive or affricate.

Coda /n ɲ ŋ/ become [ɹ̃ j̃ ɰ̃] except when preceding an occlusive of their place of articulation.

Phonotactics

(C)V(V)(C)

The only word-final coda consonants allowed are nasals.

Vowels with different tones cannot make up a diphthong together.

[auw-0rr]

After dropping my Art hot takes, it's time to drop my romanization hot takes!

1: don't use h+l/r/any nasal or sonorant to indicate voiceless variants. Y'all have no idea how ugly that looks. Like genuinely who's going to come here and tell me with a straight face that using "ahna" is better than "anha" to write /a.n̥a/??

And idc if Portuguese people use nh to make /ɲ/. We have other cool things for /ɲ/.

2: anything other than 'eu' to romanize 'ɯ' is pure, raw, unchecked sin. I don't need explaining, there's a reason people use eu, it looks cool asf and nothing will ever compare.

3: stop using English coded symbols. Why use ch, sh, zh and dzh when you have č, š, ž and dž,? Why use y to indicate palatalization when you have 'i' or 'j', or even just a diacritic? Or using 'kh' for /x/ when you could use j, ch, h, x, ç, literally anything else? The world of letters is filled with options and people somehow think using shi like 'zh' is acceptable.

...yeh I think I'm done here

[haxyr3]

Is there a difference between Dmitri and Dmitry?

It is simply two different ways to transliterate the same male name that is actually Дмитрий in Russian. The transliteration of Russian text from the Cyrillic script into the Latin script is called Romanization. And there are many different international standards for that - here you can learn more about it.

If you write academic papers and have to cite Russian sources, this website will help you to transliterate names and book titles correctly according to your selected standard (normally, for the USA and Canada, it is the American Library Association (ALA) and the Library of Congress (LC) standard)