lizzybennet: (books)
lizzybennet ([personal profile] lizzybennet) wrote2009-05-12 04:54 pm

(no subject)

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.

[identity profile] mysteena.livejournal.com 2009-05-13 05:02 pm (UTC)(link)
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 :)