transliteration in ASCII

[Yoshimasa Tsuji]

Hello,
Neither Library of Congress nor ISO transliteration scheme is
ASCII-compliant. LC transliteration requires ties, breve signs,
etc. while ISO requires a hacek. Both of them are excellent if
an appropriate environment is provided (e.g. an SGML source code
and its interpreter), but few of us want to waste our time complying
with LC or ISO.
  As a result, when we say we write in LC or ISO, it is often the
case that we actually ignore all those vitally important diacritical
marks, making --ii and --ij endings identical.
  However, using j or y for "short i", most of the problems of
transliteration vanish.
  I think any of the transliteration schemes should be welcome as long as
they are unambiguous, INTUITIVELY understood (one only needs to understand
the letter "j" is a half-vowel i in some languages) and use only ASCII
characters.

Cheers,
Tsuji