Hello everyone! I was looking through the ranked section the other day and I came across this set : beatmapsets/43674#fruits/137766.

The official unicode title of this song is βiοs, using the greek letter β which is read as v. However this romanization used on the romanized field is B which, on the contrary is read as b and not v. b in greek is μπ. This made me realize that we dont have greek romanization rules currently for greek letters and while ofcourse there arent many greek songs getting mapped/ranked, its nice to have a standard to follow whenever the chance arises, to avoid possible confusion between romanized titles of greek songs/ general usage of greek lettering.

The first romanization standard was the one released by the the Hellenic Organization for Standardization (ELOT) in cooperation with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 1983, ELOT 743. This was then revised and issued by the PCGN/BGN with some minor changes. As I am no expert, I would love to hear more experienced people's views on which standard should be used in the case we apply it and also if I'm wrong since i only used the wikipedia article and some other sources i got from greek government portal.

Should be noted that google translate uses the revised 2001 ELOT/UN Transliteration Standard for its romanization on the greek field.

Also If i were to choose one it would be the 2001 revised ELOT standard since PCGN/BGN simplifies some sounds like ευ and αυ which are pronounced differently depending on the context.

All in all, I propose adding this on the romanization tab of the metadata RC


or


It might not get used much, but I've known people wanting to map greek songs or tracks that the artist has chosen to use greek letters, leading to possible confusion as to how to transcript the greek characters.

Thank you all for your time

References
+ https://web.archive.org/web/20150922010901/http://sete.gr/files/Media/Egkyklioi/040707Latin-Greek.pdf

dystopiaground augoeides

I've been planning on mapping/pushing a greek song for the ranked section sometime in the future, so this would be pretty useful if implemented

While one concern might be that Greek words that already exist in English would look weird if romanized letter by letter, I think that since e.g. Japanese titles are romanized properly we may as well do the same for Greek so yeah I support this

what about cases like tracks 8-11 from this album? does this rule would enforce properly romanising those too? because i personally think it makes more sense to romanise single characters to their english names (in this case, code : alpha instead of code : a)

edit: actually there are cases when that wouldn't be ideal too (like camellia's δ:for the delta), also some fancy stylizations utilizing greek letters (like huΣer), so perhaps adding something along those line would work? "For greek letters that aren't part of greek words, use common sense when romanising"

SaltyLucario wrote:

what about cases like tracks 8-11 from this album? does this rule would enforce properly romanising those too? because i personally think it makes more sense to romanise single characters to their english names (in this case, code : alpha instead of code : a)

edit: actually there are cases when that wouldn't be ideal too (like camellia's δ:for the delta), also some fancy stylizations utilizing greek letters (like huΣer), so perhaps adding something along those line would work? "For greek letters that aren't part of greek words, use common sense when romanising"

In the example you sent, 3 out of 4 song titles are romanized as they would without the rule.


code : α -> code: a
code : β -> code: v
code : Ω -> code: O
code : Σ -> code: S

Using the ELOT system the only difference would be β which would be then transliterated in the correct way, as β = v and not b

δ is still d
HuΣer is HuSer considering he used Σ for S

The edge case you presented is correct though, and its valid. Many artists use Greek for stylization and not for actually taking advantage of the phonetics of greek for the words ( Using Σ as an E just cause its similar in shape ).

We could add a clause to limit the use of it in apparent stylizations so they are romanized as indended ( Kinda like how augoeides was romanized) or how songs like [ ⫖⌊∄∄◗ ⫖⌊⦰⦰ꗐ ] ( camellia song) should be romanized but that is somewhat breaking the rule in itself/making it ambiguous

Greek romanization in my head was to be primarily used on greek songs for greek words. The problem with english titles using greek for aesthetics is the fact that enforcing the rule has adverse effects since the usage of the letters in the offical title usually is incorrect, and the artists most likely used it cause they are similar to the latin letter in shape and not phonetically

the point is that HuΣer is HuMer but stylized using greek as a sideways M. I think just specifying greek not used as stylization but like actually greek is what needs to be romanized using that system, and stylized "greek" letters can be romanized according to context

Nao Tomori wrote:

the point is that HuΣer is HuMer but stylized using greek as a sideways M. I think just specifying greek not used as stylization but like actually greek is what needs to be romanized using that system, and stylized "greek" letters can be romanized according to context

Yeah, I'm more than fine with that, since the romanization proposed should only affect actual greek words, but how can we word it as a rule without being ambiguous?

"if song title or artist use the greek language (!not just letters for stylization!)..." maybe

Not gonna lie seeing "Vios" as the title knowing it's supposed to be a romanization of "βίος" would just seem wrong because this word is used in English as well as a prefix (bio-).

Also

Nokashi wrote:

code : α -> code: a
code : β -> code: v
code : Ω -> code: O
code : Σ -> code: S

Using the ELOT system the only difference would be β which would be then transliterated in the correct way, as β = v and not b

I also disagree with this, I don't think romanizing standalone letters like that makes any sense, 'β' should be 'b' or 'beta' for a case such as this one not 'v'.

Anyways I don't see Greek songs being mapped often so this might end up being a very unnecessary addition.

Genjuro wrote:

Not gonna lie seeing "Vios" as the title knowing it's supposed to be a romanization of "βίος" would just seem wrong because this word is used in English as well as a prefix (bio-).

I think that since the song was released under the name "βίος", the romanisation should reflect the pronunciation properly instead of drawing correlations with the English equivalent of the word.

For the same reason, I think this should be romanised as "Okeanos" instead of "Oceanus".
beatmapsets/267767#osu/609843

That being said, literally everywhere I see these songs they are romanised as "Bios" and "Oceanus", so it would be interesting to find out why that's the case.

awesomemacD wrote:

For the same reason, I think this should be romanised as "Okeanos" instead of "Oceanus".
beatmapsets/267767#osu/609843

just want to note oceanus is bad example as that's official translation (https://imgur.com/iHSr4os)

based on what I have seen this is what I would add as the guideline:

Aiq wrote:

dystopiaground augoeides

augoeides is kinda different tho bc it's actually a japanese song, so it's supposed to be read as augoeides

also can we just change this to romanization rules for similar languages like serbian, which have letters that are read differently than in english?

I do not think we should be adding dedicated sections to RC for languages which are rarely ranked, so I've opened a new thread about that specifically here: community/forums/topics/1357437

Nokashi is alright with archiving this in favor of the new thread.