THE YAKHA: CULTURE, ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT IN ...

A Note on Transliteration and Transcription
There is no perfect way of converting Nepali, which is
conventionally written in devang~ari, into Roman script. Turner (1931)
provides one authoritative system, and I have used his dictionary, as
we11 as that of Pokhrel et a1 (2040 V, S. ) , as the source of the
devand~ari for my transcriptions. However, the system developed by
Adhikary (19881 is diacritically simpler and thus has the merit of being
direct ly usable by a wider range of contemporary word-processors. For
this reason it is the system I have chosen to use for Nepali
transcriptions throughout. The only exception is where I use this form
of transcription for proper names or to begin a sentence, when
(following English convention) 1 use a capital letter. Where there is
variation in the pronunciation of Nepa! i consonants (such as exists with
y, for example) and where there is a choice of spellings in Turner or
elsewhere, I choose that closest to the pronunciation normally found in
East Nepal. Nepali words are presented underlined.
The Romanized Nepali one often sees in NepaI (on some government
buildings, for example, in English language newspapers or when people
write their names and addresses on letters abroad) tends to fo:low
neither Adhikary nor Turner, It is perhaps closer to Meerendonk (1955)
but without his diacritics, and with the Nepali 'c' merged with 'ch',
This is by far the simplest system for the lay person to read smoothly,
and so words which are commonly rendered in this form (such as caste
names and place names), I present similarly,
The transcription of Yakha is more complex since it is a language
which was previously unwritten and unrecorded, and which has some
!nteresting phonological features, Van Driem (1987) has an excellent
system for the transcription of the related Limbu language, but
unfortunately his complex diacritics are also beyond the scope of the
major i ty of word-pi-ocessors. I have therefore developed my own,
simpler, orthography for the transcription of Yakha words, which are
italicized, For instance, I use ' rather than van Driem's to
represent a glottal stop. Words which were the same in Nepali and
Yakha are sometimes both i ta! ic ized and under1 ined. However, there were
usually pronunciation differences between such words used by Yakha and
their equivalents used by speakers of Nepali as a first language. A
selected list of Yakha words appears in Appendix I.