Why no Cyrillic?

[James Beale]

Not server up any crow,  but sometimes either the sender's email (program or
ISP) or somewhere en route the encoding information can get stripped out and
then there is no way to recreate or re-encode correctly to get the Cyrillic
back.  Thankfully as everyone has slowly upgraded systems, I don't see this
as much in correspondence from our Russian publisher partners, but every
once and awhile.

I agree about the transliteration - having been forced earlier to do this
(due to encoding problems) it has negatively affected my own written
Russian.

James Beale
Russia Online, Inc.

http://www.russia-on-line.com
Tel: 301-933-0607   FAX: 301-933-0615

Try our new online shop!   http://shop.russia-on-line.com


-----Original Message-----
From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list
[mailto:SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu] On Behalf Of Richard Robin
Sent: Wednesday, February 04, 2009 4:42 PM
To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Why no Cyrillic?


*Дорогие SEELANGовцы!*

I'm going to play my broken record over again. Cyrillic could travel well
over e-mail platforms if everyone obeyed the well established rules (the
short version: UTF-8). But there's always a way to use a recalcitrant
institutional e-mail address and still send and receive Cyrillic. See
http://www.gwu.edu/~slavic/gw-cyrillic/cyrilize.htm#cmail<http://www.gwu.edu
/%7Eslavic/gw-cyrillic/cyrilize.htm#cmail>.
(It explains the "UTF-8" as well as what to do when you get gibberish.)

I realize that I sing this song a lot. But exchange of information in
written Russian is a part of 21st Century Russian literacy. We don't allow
our first-year students to hand in transliterated homework. We even insist
that they learn Cyrillic script. (I don't know any Russian teacher who buys
the *"I never use script in English!"* excuse.) Computer literacy is
analogous.

That said, I will be the first to admit that I sometimes accompany my
Cyrillic to this list with transliteration (на всякий пожарный случай - na
vsiakii pozharnyi sluchai) when I need to reach the widest audience.

But I would hope that as a profession, we are striving towards overcoming
the technical difficulties of Cyrillic in e-mail, both public and private,
precisely because for those who deal in Russian, it is part of our
communicative sphere.

Sincerely,
Richard Robin

P.S. And I'll be glad to take a look at whatever e-mail from a Russian
company didn't arrive with Cyrillic intact. That should never have happened
and should be fixable. Or else I'm going to end up eating a lot of crow!


> > Hi Everyone,
> >
> > I just subscribed to this list and I've noticed that _most_ people 
> > do not use Cyrillic when typing Russian, is there a reason for this?
>

-- 
Richard M. Robin, Ph.D.
Director Russian Language Program
The George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052
202-994-7081
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Russkiy tekst v UTF-8

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