Composers' names in various alphabets

Search a name

Jump to page containing names starting with A B C Ч D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S Ш Щ T U V W X Y Z Ж

What is this collection about?

Whoever writes about chess problems will sooner or later face the question of how to write in his own alphabet composers' names whose original writing is in a different alphabet. Various approaches, with a variety in linguistic precision, have traditionally been used to answer this question.

The limitations of typewriters and early computer based text processing systems in writing accented letters, let alone letters from foreign alphabets, were a major obstacle to writing composers' names in an appropriate way in the past. With the advent of Unicode and its support by many text processing systems, we are now able to write and display virtually all characters used on this planet.

Which leads to the next question: which characters should we write? The tables on the pages linked below contain writings of composers' names

• in their own alphabet
• using some standard transliterations and transcriptions
• in some widely used and/or large collections

In addition, you'll find

• country (e.g. the country for which (s)he would contribute in the WCCT) as an ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 code
• date of birth (if known) and date of death (with the obvious restrictions)

Whenever you are about to write the name of a composer that is originally written in an alphabet different from yours, you should be able to look up his or her name on this site and copy one of the standard writings to paste it into your document. The more complete these tables become, the better will be your chances to write all foreign alphabet names in the same transliteration or transcription, which will give your document a desirable unity.

We are not there yet! This collection is not only meant to serve you; it also relies on your collaboration. Below, you'll find the Terms of Usage and information on how you can contribute.

Structure of the pages?

Each page consists of a table, of which each row represents one composer.

Currently, the tables have the following columns:

• Last/First name: Name as written in the composer's own alphabet
• Additional identifier: additional information useful for distinguishing different composers with the same last and first names (e.g. "jr.")
• Alt. Last/First names: Alternative names or alternative writings used by the composer (e.g. "Julius" as an alternative to "Gyula")
• Pseudonyms: Pseudonyms used by the author (e.g. "Skarabäus")
• Name of alphabet: Name of the alphabet normally used by the composer to write his/her name
• Country: ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 code of the country/countries where the composer lives/lived
• Birth, Death: Date of birth and death
• PDB: Last/First name: For names originally extracted from the PDB: the writing the PDB used at that time. For other names either leave empty or convert the author's name to a representation that only uses the Latin characters A to Z and ÄÖÜäöü.

Some basic linguistics

The previous paragraph used two linguistic terms without defining them:

• transcription
• transliteration

Both transcriptions and transliterations transform a group of one or more characters of a source alphabet into a group of one or more characters in a destination language based on a set of criteria.

A transcription will apply transformations that make it easy for a person reading the text in the destination language to pronounce the transformed characters. The Cyrillic character "Ч" sounds like the character sequence "tsch" in German (as in the name of the river "Etsch"); "Ч" is therfore transcripted into "tsch" in German. The same character sounds like the character sequence "ch" in English (as in "chess"); "Ч" is therfore transcripted into "ch" in English.

The governing criterion in transliteration is that it be "lossless"; a name written in the Cyrillic alphabet can be transliterated into the Latin alphabet and back into into the Cyrillic alphabet without ambiguity. The Cyrillic character "Ч" is transliterated into the (extended) Latin "č".

More Information

How did the collection start?

This collection was started in July 2005 based on the authors' tables of the PDB. These tables were originally created by Norbert Geissler.

What does TWiki mean?

The technological foundation of this collection is called Wiki (Hawaiian for "quick"), a WWW server that allows a group of people to easily and collaboratively create pages. The best known WWW service based on Wiki technology is the huge online encyclopedia WikiPedia.

One of the many flavors of Wiki is TWiki (as in "tweakable Wiki" - pronounced accordingly), which adds some tools that make the collaborative work even easier.

What does Unicode mean?

The Unicode project aims at mapping every character known to be used on earth to a distinct number, its so-called "code point". Documents whose so-called "encoding" is based on Unicode can thus contain characters from various alphabets, including these very important characters.

Nowadays, the leading office tools suites such as Microsoft Office or OpenOffice support Unicode very well. An appropriate font (such as Arial Unicode MS) may have to be selected to allow all characters in a document to be displayed, though. See also Fonts and software resources for the Unicode Character Set if you have problems displaying Unicode characters.

How do I work with this collection?

This collection has two basic usages:

• looking up a name to be used in a written text
• contributing to the collection (i.e. adding a name or a writing of a name, or correcting a mistake)

How do I look up a name?

The easiest way to look up a name is to use the "Search a name" button at the top of this page. Type in a a writing of the name and hit the button to get a list of pages containing this writing.

Alternatively, you can directly jump to the page that you assume to contain the name based on the name's first character.

This is trickier than it sounds for names whose original alphabet is not the Latin alphabet. Look up these names on the page for the first letter of the last name in the typical Latin writing. In particular, names starting with the Cyrillic letter Ч are to be found on page C Ч eventually (currently, also look for them on page T), those starting with the cyrillic letters С, Ш or Щ on page S Ш Щ, and those starting with Ж on page Z Ж (currently, also look for them on page S Ш Щ).

Each of the 26 pages contains a table consisting of a header row and many data rows. The header row serves two purposes:

• each header field describes the meaning of the cells in the column below it
• each header field is a link; clicking on it will sort the table according to that column in ascending order

How can I contribute?

Contributing to this collection typically means editing one of the 26 pages. To be able to do that, you have to be a registered user. The requirement to be registered is completely against the the collaborative spirit of Wiki; openly editable WWW sites tend to be abused for purposes quite different from chess composition these days, though.

This is how you become a registered user:

1. Clicking the "Register" link in the left column will lead you to the register form. Enter your name, E-Mail address (needed for notifications), TWiki user name and password (twice, to prevent typing errors). Your user name has to be a WikiWord, i.e. a word consisting exclusively of ASCII characters that starts with a capital letter and that has a capital letter somewhere in the middle; e.g. ThomasMaeder
2. Once you are registered, a member of the TWikiAdminGroup will add you to the PcccGroup and send you an E-Mail message informing you about it
3. As a member of the PcccGroup, you can now edit the 26 pages

To edit one of the 26 pages, either

• Hit the Edit button at the bottom of the table (preferred), or
• Click on the Edit link at the top or bottom of the page

The Edit button at the bottom of the table opens a (hopefully) self-explaining table editor.

The Edit links at the top or bottom of each page open the page editor, which offers more editing features but is less friendly, particularly for new users. Note the "Formatting help" and the "More formatting help" link at the bottom of the editor. When using the page editor, please always first use the Preview button to preview your work and only use Save when you are done and everything you intend it to be.

Three notes on editing text in a non-Latin alphabet:

• the table editor and the page editor display non-Latin characters in the form &#nnnn;, where nnnn is the so-called Unicode "code point" of the character; don't let this worry you - TWiki will accept the non-Latin letters that you type with your non-Latin keyboard just as well. The &#nnn; form and the normal character representation can even be mixed in the same word.
• many letters of the Cyrillic alphabet have the same graphical representation as a letter in the Latin alphabet (e.g. А (Cyrillic) and A (Latin)). Cyrillic and Latin letters should not be mixed in the same word; so when you enter a name in its Cyrillic form, exclusively use Cyrillic letters, and when writing it in the Latin form, only use Latin letters.
• TWiki has no support for entering text from right to left, which would be the preferred way in the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets; these names have to be typed either backwards or using a lot of cursor key acrobatics. The TWiki page editor allows table cells to be right-aligned, though.

Terms of Usage

This collection is meant to be used freely and without hassle. Collections such as this one will only "fly" if everybody collaborates, though.

The collection may therefore be used under the following terms:

1. You are invited to freely (as in "free beer") use as much content from this collection as many times as you like.
2. When, while using this collection, you spot an error that you are able to correct, or a hole that you are able to fill, you are required to do so.
3. If you have a suggestion that might help us make this collection better, you are urged to inform a member of the TWikiAdminGroup
4. If you are (or intend to become) a nice person, you are suggested to browse through the pages to correct and fill in whatever errors and holes that you are able to
5. If this collection provides you a valuable service, you are allowed to express your appreciation (as in "free beer" or similar currency) to members of the PcccGroup wherever you meet them

These terms are solely enforced by your conscience.

-- ThomasMaeder - 16 Jul 2005