Talk:Beothuk language

Comment

Apparently, the Beothuk word for "(the?) evil spirit" was something like aichmodyim. The resemblance to Asmodeus is striking. I wonder if there is anything to be made of it. A. Shetsen 20:20, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

• PS. Although it's surely a coincidence, the fact remains that it's curious. A. Shetsen 06:49, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

The external link to the Beothuk song is broken, anybody know where to find this file?

transliteration

Transliteration can be from words to letters, see dicdef. Gwen Gale (talk) 02:56, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

The definition given is ambiguous (note "corresponding characters of another language or alphabet" - Beothuk had no characters for another system to correspond to) and is from a general purpose dictionary. Dictionaries of linguistics make the difference between transcription and transliteration quite clear: "In the study of writing systems, the conversion of one writing system into another. Each character of the source language is given an equivalent character in the target language...Transliteration needs to be distinguished from transcription, in which the sounds of the source word are conveyed by letters in the target language." transliteration from Crystal, A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, p. 474; and "Any conventional system for representing in one orthography a language which is ordinarily written in a different orthography, normally by merely replacing each character of the ordinary orthography in a uniform manner by some character or sequence of characters in the orthography being used, with no attempt at providing a phonetic or phonemic transcription." transliteration again in Trask, A Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology, p. 361 Ergative rlt (talk) 21:26, 15 September 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for answering here and for those definitions. I agree transcription is the closer linguistic term. Gwen Gale (talk) 22:30, 15 September 2011 (UTC)

Likely Misinformation

I don't know who or when all of this was added to the article, but the claims that the language is still in use in the intro really need to be rectified on this article, if not verified. I won't mess with the article myself because I am not fully informed on the subject, but considering that most of the article indicates that the language died around the early 19th Century and was never revivied, it's hard for me to trust the claims about it being spoken today, especially without a source. AnyGuy (talk) 21:57, 11 March 2023 (UTC)