Why no Cyrillic?

[Paul B. Gallagher]

[redirecting my reply to the list]

Susan Bauckus wrote:

> an example of papers published with Russian text that are likely to
> be of general interest were the ones we published last June or so in
> the Heritage Language Journal, in the issue on Russian as a heritage
> language. We transliterated almost all Russian text appearing in
> those papers. I think it's likely that most people reading those
> papers were not Slavists, but no matter who read them, that kind of
> accessibility was important to us because the phenomenon of heritage
> language knowledge, acquisition, loss, and instruction extend far
> beyond Slavic.

Once again, these are purposes other than posting to SEELANGS. I'm not 
advocating all Cyrillic, all the time, for all purposes. Transliteration 
has its uses, but in general, I don't think this should be one of them.

> I would say that knowing Cyrillic for languages that use a Cyrillic
> alphabet is more than a "tool of the profession;" it's essential to
> knowing the language well. However, not everyone here is a
> Russianist, Ukrainianist, Bulgarianist, or whatever.  And I don't
> agree that "a serious Russianist  would have made the commitment to
> acquire the necessary skills and technology." Are you sure? you can
> post in Cyrillic all you like, and take care to configure things
> properly, but how much control do you have over other people's
> messages to you?

I can read well-formed incoming messages and most defective ones; some 
are more trouble than others. My least favorite is the variant where 
character entities appear as ampersand-numeric code-semicolon. The only 
ones I can't decipher are those in which the sender has used a 7-bit 
encoding, which turns all non-ASCII characters to indistinguishable 
question marks. I have made the commitment, and yes, I am sure.

-- 
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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