Why no Cyrillic?

[Evgeny Steiner]

Dear Colleagues,



Possibly computers or e-mail applications should be blamed less than their
users. I'm neither a maven nor a geek in computers, but without any
extraordinary efforts I made my machine (US English-based Windows platform)
able to read, write and receive texts in Cyrillic, Chinese/Japanese or
Hebrew scripts. There might be occasional problems with converting
diacritics from some users or websites, though. On the other hand, from time
to time I get messages from people (even those in Russia) saying that my
Cyrillic text was illegible and asking me to repeat it in the Roman letters.
And usually these people write in Russian using the Roman script in the most
inventive but the least conventional or even consistent way of
transliteration. I daresay that if this is something about literacy, this is
not about the computer one. It's even more than about proficiency in this or
that language, be it Russian, English or Japanese. It's about how we
nowadays position ourselves in the role of homo legens or homo scribens. I
still remember my trepidation of student days when upon opening a book I saw
the quotations given not only in Greek, Roman or Hebrew letters but often
without direct translations at all. Same with scholarly books on
Chinese/Japanese and Sanskrit subjects. (And, of course, no translations of
French, German, Italian quotes.) Sure enough, these books were published no
later than the 19th - early 20th cc. And all the typesetting back than was
manual. Now with all those computer marvels the picture is quite different.
Recently I was asked to give an article to a collection of papers of one of
the most prestigious (this is the general opinion, not exactly my personal
one) Moscow institutions. Having heard about their high standards, I
laboriously furnished my text with Japanese characters and macrons. All
disappeared in the proofs. "We use a cheap printing shop, they cannot do
it," was the explanation. (Their cheapness went as far as to eliminate the
dots in 'Ё' ('Yo') which is simply inadmissible in transliteration of
Japanese words.)  I'm afraid that with computer generated camera-ready films
the technical difficulties should not be an issue. Some "human factors"
should be at work (or rather not at work).



Evgeny Steiner


P.S. I permit myself to attach a link to a transcript of my public lecture
on the Cyrillic alphabet and Japanese syllabaries delivered in the Moscow
literary club appropriately called Bilingua. There I discuss, inter alia,
the fate of the Cyrillic abroad and amongst computer users:
http://www.polit.ru/lectures/2008/02/14/azbooka.html


-- 
Professor Evgeny Steiner
Senior Research Associate
Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures
SOAS, University of London
Brunei Gallery, B401
Russell Square
London WC1H 0XG
United Kingdom

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                    http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------