From: sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog)
Subject: Re: If I ever get to speak to Cyril and Metodius...
Organization: Enea Data AB
Date: Sun, 20 Dec 1992 22:34:19 GMT

Ivan A Derzhanski (iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk) writes:
>>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?

Either dropping them entirely, or writing them separately. The latter
tends to look ugly, but may be preferable when accuracy is needed.
TeX representation for non-ASCII letters are popular among some people,
but I find it dreadful. (I don't speak TeX, and the braces and back-
slashes tend to come up as characters on my terminal.)

>>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 you are not the world Ivan.

>> 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.

Well, those who believe that all languages are pronounced the same,
are in for a real treat.

The confusion with different transcriptions arises when I see name
in say Swedish, and then use that in an English text and mistransforms
it so that the name is not recognized by other readers. A good example
is a UPI telegramme I saw on the Estonian elections. The names of all
four candidates were misspelled. The conclusion was that the sloppy
journalist had transcribed the names back to Roman script from Cyrillic.

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

What about the hook on the squared W? What about the hook on the soft
sign? What about the underline on the L to make it a D? What about..?
Didn't you want distinct character shapes? Why are Z, Z-acute and
Z-dot in Polish less distinct than W with and without hook? Not
talking of "je" and "jo" when the latter is not dotted.

I can't speak for the Poles, but if you're telling me that the
26th letter of the Swedish is an A with a diacritic on it, you
are dead wrong. For me that is just another letter like Q or E.
My guess is that the same applies to the Poles.

>As for Russian digraphs, I have no idea what you have in mind.

bI, T-soft, L-soft, N-soft etc. Not talking of the funny effects
when consonants are followed by certain vowels. Distinct character
shapes? Bah.

>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).

This is true for the digraphs in Russian as well, but it also true
for many of the digraphs in languages written with Roman letters
as well.

As this discussion is getting rather silly for a forum like sci.lang,
I like to make the statement that I don't believe in any superority
of the Latin script - except its actual domination today - over the
Cyrillic or any other alphabetic script, and neither do I am prepared 
to buy that characters shapes used in the Cyrillic script would be 
superior to those of the Latin script. Both are sets of symbols, 
which can be applied more or less well.

Our preference of scripts is likely to coincide with what we have
been brainwashed, eh I mean taught first. I was taught Roman, Ivan
Cyrillic.

But undoubtedly, we would live in a simpler world if we all used the
same script - even if it was Cyrillic. :-)
-- 
Erland Sommarskog - ENEA Data, Stockholm - sommar@enea.se
Newsgroups: sci.lang