Re: OT: Russian in ASCII?

On Tue, Dec 30, 2003 at 08:11:33PM +0100, Jean-François  Colson wrote:
> Is there an official system of transliteration/transcription of Russian into
> the Latin alphabet, I mean a system used internationally and/or approved by
> the Russian government or by scholars?
There are a variety of more or less official systems.  The one used most
often in US publications is the Library of Congress (LoC) system.
However, the LoC system doesn't work in ASCII; it requires several Unicode
characters, such as LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH BREVE (used to render
i kratkoe) and the long arc diacritic used in IPA for affricates,
which is used to distinguish digraphs from pairs of monographs.
Also, e by itself represents the palatized e, and e with an overdot represents
э.

For what it's worth, here's the system I personally use in ASCII.  It's a
modification of the LoC system, with j for
i kratkoe, io for ё, je instead of just e, etc.  In Russian alphabetic order,
it runs as follows:

a b v g d je jo zh z i j k l m n o p r s t u f kh ts ch sh shch " y ' e ju ja

The LoC also includes rules for older Cyrillic letters not used in modern
Russian but used in CHurch Slavonic and some other languages; I don't
account for those in my system.

-Mark

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