Medieval Latin was the form of Latin used in the Middle Ages, primarily as medium of scholarly exchange and as liturgical language of the Roman Catholic Church, but also as language of science, literature, law, and administration. Therefore Latin-skills are the basic premise to read and understand a wide range of sources from this period of time. We would like to draw your attention to two tutorials created by experts from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland National Archives that provide help to improve reading skills in Medieval Latin by translating sentences taken from real documents held at The National Archives.
12 basic lessons: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/latin/beginners
12 advanced lessons: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/latin/advanced
The transliteration of characters from non-Latin scripts differs from target language to target language and from purpose to purpose (literal/phonetic). The encoding of special characters that are used in these transliterations does as well.
The online-converter 2cyr.com now provides a tool for the automatic transliteration of languages written in Kyrillic to Latin script and vice versa. It is also possible to use an individually created transliteration for special needs.
For the lack of a common one-to-one encoding of characters within one transliteration system the machine-based conversion of bibliographic data is difficult. Nevertheless 2cyr.com is a useful instrument and with the help of a screen keyboard it is possible to make requests to Unicode-based library catalogues, bibliographical databases, search engines in general and paste the received information to the own reference management software.
individuelle Anpassung der Umschrift für jedes einzelne Zeichen
Transliteration of non-latin scripts very often adapts to the sound of the target language.
For instance the name of the Russian author Солженицын is transliterated Solschenizyn in German, Solzhenitsyn in English and Soljentisyne in French. Research libraries all over the world apply specific standards for transliteration according to their national rules of catalogizing. Unfortunately very often it is difficult to figure out from the websites of the libraries.
Online Public Access Catalogs (OPAC) which transliteration system is applied for which language.
An introduction to this subject that deals with the transliteration of Hebrew offers the online-publication of Susanne Marquardt.
