----- Original Message -----
From: "Alexander Savenkov" <savenkov@...>
To: "Jean-Francois Colson" <fa597525@...>
Cc: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Saturday, January 03, 2004 9:41 PM
Subject: Re[2]: OT: Russian in ASCII?
> > What I'm looking for is a system of which the use is official in Russia
or
> > the system most used by the Russian speakers. What is, for example, the
> > system used for the electronic addresses (www, e-mail, usenet...)?
>
> That would be GOST 10708-81.
OK
> > That's not the solution because Winamp uses an 8-bit font. I have some
> > hundreds of MP3 files on my computer and many of them have titles or
artist
> > names which include French diacritics. I have only some tens of Russian
MP3
> > files and I don't wish to endlessly change the font. That's why I'll
> > transliterate the Russian titles and, if ever Winamp become Unicode
> > compliant, I'll transliterate the titles back to the Cyrillic letters.
>
> You can mail those titles to me so that I can transliterate them.
Useless. I already converted them to Unicode but I hesitate a bit on the
transliteration scheme to use.
> It'd
> be interesting to know what are your preferences. I just hope it's not
> Tatu. ;)
Аквариум.
> >> Here's the system which is used daily in Russia:
> >>
> >> a b v g d e yo zh z i y k l m n o p r s t u f kh ts ch sh sch ' y ' e
yu
> > ya
>
> > That's an ambiguous system. Is it really used everyday by the majority
of
> > the Russian speakers?
>
> Well, first of all, I don't think the majority of the Russian speakers
> have ever used this system. They just don't need it as they speak and
> write Russian.
I meant: by the majority of the Russians who need such a system for a reason
or another.
>
> Secondly, it's not that ambiguous.
>
> [...]
>
> Once you get familiar with the system, it'd be as easy as a pie.
OK. That's not ambiguous once you're accustomed to the Russian phonology and
you've got a good transliteration program which "knows" of all the rules to
choose between a letter or another.
>
> > If ever I use the ГОСТ 16876-71 transliteration system to write in
Russian
> > when I have no possibility to easily type the Cyrillic letters, could
that
> > pose some problems of reading to any Russian?
>
> I guess any transliteration system could pose some problems to most
> Russians. The script is different and that is a problem. If ever I use
> some Latin2Cyrillic transliteration system when I have no possibility
> to easily type the Latin letters, could that pose some problems of
> reading to any French? :)
If ever you want to send an e-mail from a US cyber-café, I'm not sure you'll
have the possibility to adapt the computer to your own needs installing a
cyrillic keyboard driver.
Many Russian/Bulgarian/Serbian keyboards have the cyrillic and the latin
letters on the same keys and it's quite easy to switch from one script to
the other. Yes, there's no French diacritics on them, but you can send your
message without diacritics and I don't think that would pose a problem to
anyone who knows French.
I repeat and I precise my question:
If ever I use the ГОСТ 16876-71 transliteration system to write in
Russian
when I have no possibility to easily type the Cyrillic letters, could
that
pose some problems of reading to any Russian who knows the Latin script
but not ГОСТ 16876-71?
>
> I *highly* recommend using the GOST 10708-81 (Road Signs) system
> which I have posted here before and which was later corrected
> by Isaac Pentzev:
>
> a b v g d e(ye) yo zh z i y k l m n o p r s t u f kh ts ch sh shch ' y ' e
yu ya
OK. I'll adopt it with 4 minor changes in order to make the system
unambiguous (to allow an automatic reverse transliteration once WinAmp --or
another similar program-- will accept Unicode IDs).
a b v g d ye yo zh z i ÿ k l m n o p r s t u f kh ts ch sh sx " ý ' e yu ya
Jean-François Colson
jfcolson@belgacom.net