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I also think this is because when you're learning Russian as a non-native speaker, the courses focus mainly on Cyrillic (naturally so) so you never really learn

I also think this is because when you're learning Russian as a non-native speaker, the courses focus mainly on Cyrillic (naturally so) so you never really learn [the romanization conventions]. There’s a number of romanization standards for Cyrillic, and which one is the most intuitive might be language-dependent (e.g. what Russian writes as a stressed ‹и› Ukrainian writes as ‹і›, which post-1918 Russian doesn’t use; what Ukrainian writes as ‹и› is closer but not identical to what Russian denotes ‹ы›, which Ukrainian doesn’t use). Wikipedia has a good summary table[1] of some of the formal standards, but these don’t cover some of the vernacular usage, so to say. The most frequent quirk is probably writing ‹щ› as ‹sch›, as you do, when standards insist on ‹shch› (my guess is because the Belarusian counterpart of ‹щ› is ‹шч›, which would also be written ‹shch›); most confusing is perhaps writing the masculine adjectival ending ‹-ий›, ‹-ый› as ‹-y› or rarely ‹-yy› (writing ‹Navalny› for the surname ‹Навальный› or ‹Zelenskyy› for the surname ‹Зеленський›, maybe because old 19th-century German-inspired romanizations usually wrote it as ‹-i›, merging the ending with its Polish counterpart). I have to say I’ve never seen ‹zsh› instead for ‹zh› for ‹ж›, though. Empirically, I’ve also found that French people struggle with pronouncing an English-inspired transliteration (‹sh› for ‹ш›, ‹ch› for ‹ч›), but have no problem with finding at least a pronounceable fallback using a Czech/Serbo-Croatian-inspired one (‹š› for ‹ш›, ‹č› for ‹ч›), so diacritics might indeed be underrated here. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Russian#Transliteration_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Russian#Transl...

dhosek 5y ago
I'd for a long time puzzled over the mysterious \t accent in TeX. Why did DEK implement this obscure diacritical and leave out the more useful Ogonek?¹ It was only when I stumbled across it (somewhat garbled) in an online card catalog entry that I discovered that it was used in some Russian transliteration schemes to represent digraphs like t͡s for ц. ⸻ 1. I suspect the other reason was that implementing the tie was technically simple since, by allowing it to extend pass its spacing width, it can be treated like any other above-character accent. Ogonek, on the other hand, unlike a cedilla or the dot-under diacritic, requires positioning based on the letter that it's attached to so can't be programmed as easily as a floating diacritic mark.
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  I see you didn’t spend a week sick in bed with no fresh reading material except for a copy of the TeXbook :) Exercises 9.4 and 9.5 from the chunk of exercises on diacritics there mention ‹Akademii͡a› for ‹Академия› (usually ‹-ija› or ‹-iya›) and ‹I͡urʼev› for ‹Юрьев› (usually ‹Ju-› or ‹Yu-›), which I remember (sans the numbers of course) exactly because I had never before seen that romanization[1] and thought it weird. But apparently the Library of Congress does use it, and if you can get hold of official English translations/selections of Soviet physics or mathematics journals from the 70s and 80s you’ll see the authors’ names spelt according to it as well. Note that in modern times, you’re supposed to use the tie to spell affricates and such in IPA as well, like in ‹t͡ʃ› and ‹d͡ʒ› and, yes, ‹t͡s›, even though nobody does as far as I’ve seen. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALA-LC_romanization_for_Russian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALA-LC_romanization_for_Russia...
  - dhosek 5y ago
    Alas, I read the TeXbook originally in 1986 and while I've dipped into it a lot since then, I've not re-read it in its entirety since that first read. I'm the one responsible for adding a section about the ALA-LC romanization in Tie (typography) on Wikipedia.
deleted 5y ago
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dhosek 5y ago

I'd for a long time puzzled over the mysterious \t accent in TeX. Why did DEK implement this obscure diacritical and leave out the more useful Ogonek?¹ It was only when I stumbled across it (somewhat garbled) in an online card catalog entry that I discovered that it was used in some Russian transliteration schemes to represent digraphs like t͡s for ц. ⸻ 1. I suspect the other reason was that implementing the tie was technically simple since, by allowing it to extend pass its spacing width, it can be treated like any other above-character accent. Ogonek, on the other hand, unlike a cedilla or the dot-under diacritic, requires positioning based on the letter that it's attached to so can't be programmed as easily as a floating diacritic mark.

mananaysiempre 5y ago
I see you didn’t spend a week sick in bed with no fresh reading material except for a copy of the TeXbook :) Exercises 9.4 and 9.5 from the chunk of exercises on diacritics there mention ‹Akademii͡a› for ‹Академия› (usually ‹-ija› or ‹-iya›) and ‹I͡urʼev› for ‹Юрьев› (usually ‹Ju-› or ‹Yu-›), which I remember (sans the numbers of course) exactly because I had never before seen that romanization[1] and thought it weird. But apparently the Library of Congress does use it, and if you can get hold of official English translations/selections of Soviet physics or mathematics journals from the 70s and 80s you’ll see the authors’ names spelt according to it as well. Note that in modern times, you’re supposed to use the tie to spell affricates and such in IPA as well, like in ‹t͡ʃ› and ‹d͡ʒ› and, yes, ‹t͡s›, even though nobody does as far as I’ve seen. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALA-LC_romanization_for_Russian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALA-LC_romanization_for_Russia...
- dhosek 5y ago
  Alas, I read the TeXbook originally in 1986 and while I've dipped into it a lot since then, I've not re-read it in its entirety since that first read. I'm the one responsible for adding a section about the ALA-LC romanization in Tie (typography) on Wikipedia.

deleted 5y ago

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