Why no Cyrillic?

Thu Feb 5 20:46:44 UTC 2009

Since my little Dostoevskii bibliography seems to be at the base of the original question, I'll add a comment or two!

The question of transliteration goes far beyond email and has a long history, predating computers (remember our libraries' card catalogs--which had paper records/cards in Cyrillic, but were interfiled into one integrated card catalog with Latin alphabet materials via transliteration?). When the first electronic databases were created in the 1970s (which eventually evolved into WorldCat et al.), there were long discussions about how to include materials in non-Roman alphabets. For Cyrillic, a decision was made to use transliterated records until such time when technology could accommodate many alphabets in one integrated system (rather than have no Cyrillic materials represented in WorldCat for decades). For the 30+ years before Unicode, transliteration has been an imperfect but usable tool for providing access to hundreds of thousands of Cyrillic titles into non-Slavic databases such as WorldCat and our own institutions' online catalogs. It was and still is a pragmatic attem!
 pt at a solution to a very complex problem. Now that technology is developing new ways of electronically integrating various alphabets, catalogers of Cyrillic materials in North America and elsewhere are beginning to create electronic records using both the original Cyrillic as well as transliteration, and these records are showing up in our libraries' online catalogs, as well as in WorldCat.  

For example, see the WorldCat record 

Petr Andreevich Zaĭonchkovskiĭ : sbornik stateĭ i vospominaniĭ k stoletii͡u istorika / [sostaviteli, L.G. Zakharova, S.V. Mironenko, T. Emmons].
Петр Андреевич Заиончковскии: сборник статеи и воспоминании к столетию историка/ [составители,Л.Г.Захарова,С.В.Мироненко,Т.Еммонс]. 

Imprint: Moskva : ROSSPEN (Rossiiskaia politicheskaia entsiklopediia), 2008. 
Москва: РОССПЕН, 2008. 
Description: 879 p. ; 25 cm.  
Topics: Historians -- Soviet Union -- Biography. 
Russia -- History -- 1801-1917. 
Zaĭonchkovskiĭ, Petr Andreevich. 
Zaĭonchkovskiĭ, Petr Andreevich -- Friends and assiciates. 
Заиончковскии,ПетрАндреевич. 
Notes: At head of title: Moskovskiĭ gosudarstvennyĭ universitet imeni M. V. Lomonosova. Istoricheskiĭ fakulʹtet. 
Includes bibliographical references. 
Language Russian 
Other authors: Zakharova, L. G. (Larisa Georgievna) 
Emmons, Terence. 
Mironenko, S. V. 
Захарова,Л.Г. (ЛарисаГеоргиевна) 
Мироненко,С.В. 
ISBN: 9785824309386 
5824309388

However, many other Western databases deal strictly with Latin alphabets only (MLA, for example), so transliteration is likely to be with us for some time to come.  We librarians still instruct our students and faculty in the use of transliteration (the Library of Congress system used in most databases, as well as many European variants), so that they can retrieve and use the fullest possible range of Cyrillic materials available. So while one might want to avoid using transliteration to write or communicate in, it would still be a service to your students to urge them to become as familiar as possible with Cyrillic transliteration to help with their bibliographic & research needs! 

June Farris

_________________
June Pachuta Farris
Bibliographer for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies
University of Chicago
Room 263 Regenstein Library
1100 E. 57th Street
Chicago, IL  60637
jpf3 at uchicago.edu
1-773-702-8456 (phone)
1-773-702-6623 (fax)

-----Original Message-----
From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list [mailto:SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu] On Behalf Of Susan Bauckus
Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2009 1:21 PM
To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Why no Cyrillic?

"That being said, I still find it preposterous that Slavicists working 
with Russian find the need to transliterate in case fellow Slavicists 
working with Russian might not have Cyrillic capability."
I suggest that it's more like a doctor and a computer specialist not being able to understand each other's jargon or knowlledge of each other's fields. unfortunate, or interesting, perhaps. why preposterous? Not being able to type in Cyrillic would be preposterous, but that's not what we're talking about. 

don't non-Russianists read linguistic papers with examples set forth in transliteration? it's a tool of the field.  

sb

-----Original Message-----
>From: "Paul B. Gallagher" <paulbg at PBG-TRANSLATIONS.COM>
>Sent: Feb 5, 2009 11:41 AM
>To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
>Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Why no Cyrillic?
>
>Valery Belyanin wrote:
>
>> Небольшой оффтоп :-)
>> я нахожу немного странным (если не сказать дискриминационным), что в работах
>> англоязычных русские публикации описываются транслитом, Вот пример из
>> соседней ветки:
>> 2.      Efimova, N.: Vetkhii Zavet v kontekste Bozh'ego mira geroev romana
>> Dostoevskogo "Brat'ia Karamazovy".
>> а в русских публикациях вся библиография иностранная идет в латинице или
>> соответствующих шрифтах.
>
>Makes perfect sense.
>
>If you have Cyrillic installed on your system, it comes with Roman so 
>you can do both. If you have Roman installed on your system, it may not 
>have Cyrillic, so you may not be able to do both. In sending information 
>to an unknown system, it is more reliable to use transliteration to 
>Roman because all systems can handle it.
>
>That being said, I still find it preposterous that Slavicists working 
>with Russian find the need to transliterate in case fellow Slavicists 
>working with Russian might not have Cyrillic capability. It's like a 
>doctor saying "thigh bone" to another doctor in case the latter might 
>not understand "femur."
>
>-- 
>War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
>--
>Paul B. Gallagher
>pbg translations, inc.
>"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
>http://pbg-translations.com
>
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Susan Bauckus
UCLA Center for World Languages
www.international.ucla.edu
Heritage Language Journal
www.heritagelanguages.org
Language Materials Project
www.lmp.ucla.edu
LA Language World
www.lalamag.ucla.edu

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