I'm not sure what you understand by the "full-complex scholarly" system
(unfortunately your example didn't come out) but what you've come up
with is pretty close to what I would describe as the scholarly system,
i.e., that used in the IVP dictionaries, NIDOTTE and the Bible Speaks
Today series.
The first two are identical, and I think exactly analagous to yours in
the information they include. BST differs slightly - they don't provide
a transliteration key so I'd need to search through for all the
differences, but unlike IVP, they mark dagesh/non-dagesh forms of the
bgdkpt letters (at least k and p - not sure whether they bother with gdt
where there's no difference) and waw is v, not w.
Comparing the three:
* in consonants, yours is a slight improvement on the others: having
tsade on z rather than s, but why not tz or ts, and shin as sh rather
than an accented s.
* marking the bgdkpt differences where there's a pronunciation
difference I think is important. And I'd do this for kaf and pe as well
as bet - I don't know about modern Hebrew pronunciation but I think all
the textbooks tell you to pronounce them k/ch and p/f, so that makes
sense to follow.
* in vowels, think I prefer theirs, but it's again fairly marginal. I'm
not sure to what extent preserving the information that some vowels
include a letter on the page is useful.
However, to be honest, they're all so close that I think the advantage
of going for an agreed standard is going to be less confusing and
outweighs having a marginally better transliteration scheme.
Given, from what Troy says, we can offer more than one transliteration
scheme, maybe we also offer a straight reading scheme which reflects
pronunciation and disregards differences between letters which sound the
same.
So, alphabet would be something like:
' b/v g d h v z kh t y k/kh l m n s ' p/ph ts k r s sh t
Vav/yodh only included if a consonant. Aleph/ayin only included if
affecting pronunciation (so not start of word, or midword with no vowel)
Vowels are ' (vocal shwah) aeiou with an accent for stronger ones.
So Gen 1:1 becomes
b'rêshît bârâ elôhîm êt hashâmayim v'êt ha'arets.
Colin
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