Re: OT: Russian in ASCII?

On Thu, Jan 01, 2004 at 04:20:07PM -0000, Christian Thalmann wrote:
> It feels strange to use y to mark the palatalizing vowels
> ya yo yu, the diphthongizing i-breve and the non-palatalizing
> bI.  It would make more sense IMHO to write ja jo ju and
> -i or maybe -j for i-breve.
Yes, that'd be the system I use.  Overloading <y> leads to ambiguity - not
to a native Russian speaker, who can easily tell what is meant based on
context once they know the transliteration system, but we poor non-native
schlubs are easily confused. :)

Whereas using the same symbol (e.g. <j>) for both short i and for the
palatalizing vowels (but not for ы) has precedent in Cyrillic itself,
where the names of the vowel letters are sometimes spelled phonetically
with a leading short i, as йа for я.

-Mark

Reply