From: iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: If I ever get to speak to Cyril and Metodius...
Date: 19 Dec 92 08:34:07 GMT
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK

In article <1992Dec13.114313.5170@enea.se> sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:
>Ivan A Derzhanski (iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk) writes:
>>But there always is a difference, while "I" and "l" are often cut
>>identical.
>
>But that is a problem with font design, not with the script itself.

So when two Roman letters look very similar, it is a fount design
problem, whereas if two Cyrillic letters look very similar, it is a
problem with the script itself?  How does that work, Erland?

>>The Romans spoke an utterly idiotic language which didn't even have any
>>palatoalveolar consonants, let alone palatalised ones.  Consequently,
>>their alphabet was an awkward choice for Slavic, which is why Polish,
>>Czech and friends are so overloaded with diacritics and digraphs.
>
>But still Czech and Polish names and words can be somewhat consistently
>rendered even in a poor ASCII environment.

How, pray?  By dropping all diacritics?  By using the TeX representation?
(Even that won't work, as CMR doesn't cater for Slavic languages.  I've
never been able to understand the point of including a bar for "L"/"l",
when there's no ogonek.)

>Russian on the other hand,
>appears in one way if the surrounding language is Swedish, another if
>it is English a third if it's German etc

Not in my writing.  I use the same romanisation for Russian, no matter
what the surrounding language.

But there is a good case for transcription as well.  The reader will
want to know how the name is pronounced, won't he?  So we may want to
try to help him by rendering the pronounciation of the name according
to the orthography of the host language.  It is not our fault that you
speakers of Roman-written languages use your bloody script in ways so
drastically different from one another.

> with good chances for confusion.

On the contrary, the confusion arises when a speaker of a Roman-written
languages tries to pronounce (ASCIIfied) words and names belonging to
another Roman-written language, with the orthography of which he is not
acquainted.  Cold comfort that they look the same in any context.

>And as for diacritics and digraphs, they appears in Cyrillic script
>as well,

Yes, but nowhere as commonly as in Roman!

>at least for Russian

What?!  Russian has exactly one letter with a diacritic mark, the
_i kratkoe_, _i_-breve (okay, two if you count the _e_-diaeresis,
which is only used in dictionaries and childrens' books).  Compare
that with Czech and Polish.

As for Russian digraphs, I have no idea what you have in mind.
It's the Caucasian languages that are rich in digraphs, but at least
their digraphs are parsed unambiguously (the second component is not
used as a letter on its own, most of the time).

>so the functional difference is scarce.

I don't think so.

-- 
 `D'ye mind tellin me whit the two o ye are gaun oan aboot?' (The Glasgow
Ivan A Derzhanski  (iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk; iad@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu)    Gospel)
* Centre for Cognitive Science,  2 Buccleuch Place,  Edinburgh EH8 9LW,  UK
* Cowan House, Pollock Halls, 18 Holyrood Park Road, Edinburgh EH16 5BD, UK
Newsgroups: sci.lang