SEEJ Transliteration Preference

[David J Birnbaum]

Dear SEELANGers,

Stephen Baehr is surely correct when he notes that the "scholarly"
transliteration system is less portable (and therefore more costly to
process when files must be transferred across systems) than LC without
diacritics. The same is true, albeit sometimes to a lesser extent, with any
non-ASCII text (including Cyrillic, for which standards do exist, but there
are multiple competing standards and there are non-standard legacy systems
in wide use). I suspect that we've all had the experience of receiving
non-ASCII files that we could read without effort and those that we
couldn't, which is to say that the fact that it can be done right doesn't
mean that it is easy for all users to do it right. From this perspective,
LC makes good economic sense.

That said, LC without diacritics makes poor informatic sense because it is
ambiguous in several places. This is not usually a problem for those who
can resolve the ambiguities by appealing to their knowledge of Russian, but
such resolution is not always possible. I remember one English-language
paper title many years ago that included the phrase "geroi nashego vremeni"
in a context that could have been understood as a reference not only to the
title of Lermontov's work, but also to the cultural model implied by this
title. Either a singular or plural of "hero" was logical when discussing
the cultural model, and knowledge of Russian language, literature, and
culture could not resolve the ambiguity. For what it's worth, i kratkoe is
a relative latecomer to Russian Cyrillic writing, which is to say that the
failure of the LC system to distinguish i from i kratkoe mirrors a
comparable lack of distinction in earlier Russian writing.

I should add that although the scholarly transliteration system would have
avoided the ambiguity in the case of geroi, it, like LC without diacritics,
does not distinguish shch from sh followed by ch. This is the only
ambiguity in the scholarly system and the sequence shows up in a very small
number of modern Russian words (e.g., vesnushchatii), which means that one
may conclude that the practical consequences of this opportunity for
ambiguity are low enough that they can be ignored. In any case, the bottom
line is that from an informatic perspective the scholarly system is also
imperfect, although much less so than LC.

One final argument in favor of LC is that it simplifies alphabetizing
bibliographies. Intuitions will almost surely converge on where names that
begin with "Sh" should be alphabetized, but S+hachek is another story, and
some users may expect that the hachek will simply be ignored during
alphabetizing, while others may expect s+hachek to be ordered separately
from plain s. LC means that nobody will have to think twice about this
question.

As Steve notes, some authors may need to use the scholarly system or real
Cyrillic because the material requires it or because the scholarly
tradition expects it. In other cases the choice may not make a difference
to the author or to readers, but it will to those who have to prepare
manuscripts for publication.

Cheers,

David
________

Professor David J. Birnbaum
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
1417 Cathedral of Learning
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260 USA
Voice: 1 412 624 5712
Fax: 1 412 624 9714
Email: djb at clover.slavic.pitt.edu
URL: http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~djb/