Transliteration replace undefined variable

In the _transliteration_replace function from 6.x-3.0 it looks like the $base variable is undefined. I'm getting question marks or unknown for any text that needs to be transliterated now. Menu item classes in my case. I stepped through the function and anything that needs transliteration has an issue at line 197 of transliteration.inc where it maps to $base. I do not see where that variable is declared.

function _transliteration_replace($ord, $unknown = '?', $langcode = NULL) {
  static $map = array();

  if (!isset($langcode)) {
    global $language;
    $langcode = $language->language;
  }

  $bank = $ord >> 8;

  if (!isset($map[$bank][$langcode])) {
    $file = drupal_get_path('module', 'transliteration') . '/data/' . sprintf('x%02x', $bank) . '.php';
    if (file_exists($file)) {
      include $file;
      if ($langcode != 'en' && isset($variant[$langcode])) {
        // Merge in language specific mappings.
        $map[$bank][$langcode] = $variant[$langcode] + $base;
      }
      else {
        $map[$bank][$langcode] = $base;
      }
    }
    else {
      $map[$bank][$langcode] = array();
    }
  }

  $ord = $ord & 255;

  return isset($map[$bank][$langcode][$ord]) ? $map[$bank][$langcode][$ord] : $unknown;
}