Re: OT: Russian in ASCII?

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Thursday, January 01, 2004 6:38 PM
Subject: 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.
>
Or, like in ГОСТ 16876-71, use a double j (jj) for й.

Jean-François Colson
jfcolson@belgacom.net