(no subject)

[lizzybennet]

Today I received a job description the work I'll be doing this summer at the LOC:

The Asian Division has a handwritten card index in a clear hand of a collection of 466 manuscripts in Sanskrit and other Indo-Aryan languages, prepared by the vendor in the 1940s. This index…essentially provides the descriptive cataloging information of each manuscript along with a small amount of subject information. [Tina] will convert as many of the cards as possible during her internship into online MARC records to be proofread by Dr. T. The records will ultimately be finalized by the Southeast Asia/South Asia cataloging team. Since there is heavy use of diacritics in languages that differ from the diacritics rendered for the major European languages, [Tina] will receive initial instruction by cataloging staff on how the diacritics should be input. If the entire index is completed during her tenure, she may create MARC records for some manuscripts not in this collection from worksheets prepared by scholar volunteers, or she may add uniform titles or subject headings under Dr. T’s supervision.

And--if like me--you need the definition of diacritics:

A mark, such as the cedilla of façade or the acute accent of resumé, added to a letter to indicate a special phonetic value or distinguish words that are otherwise graphically identical.

Comments

[themenow.livejournal.com]

I'm so lost. What are you going to be doing?

[mysteena.livejournal.com]

awww, your icon makes me miss bsg :(

I'll basically be taking a card catalog and converting it to a computer catalog.

[t-jay.livejournal.com]

Um, OK, that makes perfect sense. :oP

LOL

[t-jay.livejournal.com]

Actually, what I did understand was your definition of diacritics (after I read it a couple of times - LOL). During one of my church youth group missions trips to Mexico, I befriended a young woman from our church who had joined us on this trip; she had married a man of Mandarin origin and she was taking a course in that language so she could communicate with his family. Her final exam would be to share a brief autobiography in Mandarin, and one afternoon she asked for my help in quizzing her process. She gave me a written document in English lettering with the sounds of each Mandarin word, and she explained that each vowel has four different diacritics in which your vocal pitch would determine what that vowel was to actually be in Mandarin. After she demonstrated how each diacritic should sound I was able to tell where she needed help at times. I did this for her all week. To thank me, she invited me to her final exam presentation in San Francisco, which students could invite friends and family; afterward, she and her husband took their best friends (another married couple their age) and I out to eat in Chinatown. Normally people might feel like the fifth wheel in that situation, but I was seventeen at the time and obviously too young to be married, and even though they were all around three or four years older than I, I still had a great time with everyone.

[mysteena.livejournal.com]

Those tones were the hardest thing for me when I tried to learn Mandarin. For an American ear, they were just so hard for me to differentiate. If I tried to deliberately stress a tone, I felt silly like I was making fun of the language. But yes, that's the sort of thing I mean by diacritics :)

[sunrise0124.livejournal.com]

I hope you enjoy doing it. I can't wait to hear about all the things that you write about and I hope you can stay busy w/o hubby and your boys. ;) I know i might have a hard time with it.