User talk:OwenBlacker/Cyrillic

Just out of curiosity, what is it about the cursive Cyrillics that's undesirable? Is it the fact that some letter-forms are different and consequently confusing, or just poor display of the fonts on some systems? On the Mac, rendering of obscure characters usually falls back to the large Unicode font Lucida Grande. This font only has roman and bold styles. So in the table, all the archæic letters show up in upright form, only.

This looks to me like the start of a good article on Scientific transliteration, or Scholarly transliteration, which has been notable by its absence. You probably already know the other references:
 * Romanization
 * ISO9
 * Transliteration of Russian into English
 * Romanization of Ukrainian

If you're suggesting this be adopted as a Wikipedia-wide convention, I'm afraid the resistance will be overwhelming, although I think a universal and consistent system of Cyrillic transliteration used alongside the traditional Latin spellings would be beneficial. The traditional phonetic method (misnamed "Transliteration of Russian into English") is pretty well established among the Russian Wikipedians, and anything with diacritics is always poo-pood by the "is English your native language?" crowd. "Scientific" transliteration does get used in linguistics articles, though. Ukrainian geographic names have their own system.

&mdash;Michael Z. 2005-02-1 17:23 Z