etymology/the transliteration issue

[C. Fields]

Picture reading English and French words transliterated into Russian...!
I think it's particularly hard for native speakers of a given language to
read their own words transliterated.  ('Gyol' for 'girl' for instance!) My
Russian correspondents always talk about how difficult it is, but since
writing emails in Russian (on the computer and with the software I
currently have--current state of finances prohibiting an upgrade) would
mean typing on a KOI8 keyboard at the pace of 50 words an hour...  Since
their English isn't good enough for me to write in English, they've agreed
to put up with struggling through my transliteration to actually get an
email from me.  My email software allows me to read cyrillic, so they can
write me back without problems, and they know that they can.  Whatever
works!

Emily Fields


On Fri, 5 Nov 1999, Adassovsky Georges wrote:

> >I am a native Russian speaker and it took me a long time to read this
 message.
> >It's really awful. I can only imagine how difficult it is for non-native
> >speakers...
>
> The problem seems to be in the existence of several ways to translitterate.
> But why translitteration should be impossible while several Slavic peoples
> write using Latin letters?
>
> Georges
>