SEEJ Transliteration Preference

[Yoshimasa Tsuji]

Hello, David.
Both the "scholarly" transliterations with ha^ceks and the LC
transliterations with slurs and so on are perfect and very easy
to read. As a matter of fact I read them much faster than Cyrillic
that has some sets of almost identical graphics: c, i, n, p;
sh, shh; soft and hard signs. (However, I don't deny the fact that
most Russians read Russian in Cyrillic with much more comfort than
in Roman.)
  The point is that transliteration schemes with diacritical marks
don't have standard schemes in ASCII notation. The most probable
scheme would be the SGML notation, but very few of us read/write
all the SGML notation without efforts. And "scholarly" and LC
transliteration schemes are simply unusable if written without
diacritical marks.

  One of the reasons why scholars need to write Russian in Roman
instead of in Cyrillic is that Russian words can be transliterated
into Roman pefectly while there is no such thing as transliteration
of Roman characters into Cyrillic. (I am, of course, aware of the real reason
for it: US being the unchallengeable world empire.)

I personally use my own transliteration scheme in Russian, which is
  a b v g d e yo zh z i j k l m n o p r s t u f kh c ch sh shh " y ' eh
  ju ja.
        (w for v, yu for ju, ya for ja are allowed, but jo for yo is not.)

A simple query/replace command changes your script into any of the
Cyrillic encodings, SGML notations for ISO or LC as the notation is
good enough to be bi-directional. When a text needs to be processed
by a computer program, it is often better to replace soft and hard signs
by x and xh as quotes are not letters (FYI, x for a soft sign is
very traditional in Russia, however odd it may seem to you.)
Fita can be written as th, but jat' -- which is usually written
as e with a hacek -- is hard to code. Any ideas? (i with a dot is
left to a software that knows which i is which).


Cheers,
Tsuji