Writing Russian using ASCII character set <русский перевод>

One gets tired of the pidgin-English messages of one's Russian correspondents -- and all the variously absurd tricks they recur to to render their Russian in ASCII. Although it is no great problem to e-correspond within Russia using Cyrillic alphabet, suppose you try to access your home e-mail account via telnet from, say, Edmonton, AB ... So I worked out the system described below. This scientific spelling system:

Simplicity was an important design consideration -- simplicity of rules and simplicity of look. In particular, only non-extended ASCII characters are allowed. An exact correspondence with Cyrillic spelling was not deemed desirable inasmuch as it leads to a cumbersome spelling. 

Simplicity of look turned out to better agree with the pronunciation than with the Cyrillic spelling: so, the rules follow the standard Russian pronunciation closer than the standard Cyrillic spelling. 

As in any design, compromises could not be avoided. In allowing somewhat subjective compromises I differ from some mathematicians who devised perfect spelling systems from some precisely formulated formal criteria; such systems remain, in my view, practically useless owing to their complexity.

The system presented below is influenced by how different European languages spell their tongues and by the spelling system developed by linguists for the Chinese language (the use of q). Unfortunately, an average sovok's (this notion includes certainly includes first generation emigrants, no matter what they think of themselves) familiarity with foreign languages is so poor that s/he tends to be baffled by a spelling that is different from a rudimentary set of rules of English: for instance, the character "j" is pronounced in four different ways in four different modern European languages.

Yes, I know about the effort.

Enjoy!

    Highlights
    Examples
    Exercises
    Comments
    Statistics
    Avant-garde variation
    References

Highlights

Here is the Russian alphabet in the spelling system being recommended:

a  b  v  g  d  e/je  io/jo  zh  z  i  j  k  l  m  n  o  p  r  s  t  u  f  x  c  q  sh  sch  j  y  j  e  iu/ju  ia/ja

The most difficult points are these (see below for further comments):

Examples

  1. Simple examples: Vladimir (Владимир), lopata (лопата), ruka (рука), slony (слоны), kurica (курица). 
  2. Combinations "sh", "zh" are pronounced as in English: xorosho, zhyzha, zhuk ().
  3. Recommended: zhyzha (жижа) and cyrk (цирк) instead of zhizha and cirk. This is because when confronted with a less familiar spelling, a closer connection with phonetics may be of help, so there is little reason to retain obsolete features of the traditional spelling (but don't overdo it -- stick to the rules explicitly stated here). 
  4. The character "x": xren (хрен), xod (ход), sxodili (сходили), soxa (соха); cf. Mexico (Мехико); Don Quixote (Дон Кихот). This may be somewhat unusual but recall that the English do not use "h" for this Russian sound, they use "kh". So if you want to show off your knowledge of English you ought to write "khren". The choice of "x" allows to avoid ambiguities; cf: isxod (исход) and umalishonnyj (умалишённый) and is highly recommended (cf. below).
  5. The character "q" is used for the sound spelled in English as "ch" (ч). "q" is shorter than, say, "ch" and even retains a visual resemblance to the corresponding Russian character (ч). Examples: qashka (чашка), qort (чёрт; there is no need to write qiort -- one does not write чяшка!)
  6. The same character "j" represents 'i kratkoje', 'tviordyj znak' i 'miagkij znak' -- which, come to think of it, is rather natural. It requires a little getting used to, but recall that kids generally make mistakes when learning where to write 'tviordyj znak' because this difference is retained in Russian for purely historic reasons. The phonetic meaning of "j" is determined unambiguously. Examples: jabloko (яблоко), objavlenije (объявление), krasnaja (красная), krasnyj (красный), krasnoje (красное), matj (мать). However, I recommend to drop the superfluous and inelegant "j" at the end of words after sounds like "q" and "sh", "zh": noq (ночь), qush (чушь), lozh (ложь) -- the corresponding traditional Russian spelling has survived for purely historic reasons, and qushj does look strange.
  7. One should write "ia", "iu", "io" after consonants to render the corresponding "soft" sounds: miagkij (мягкий), driabloje (дряблое), liogkij (лёгкий). Exceptions are foreign borrowings: diagramma (диаграмма), biologija (биология). Learning a correct pronunciation of borrowed words is necessary in all languages that use the Latin character set. 
    (Two known problems here: idiot and words like priotkryl (приоткрыл). With the extended ASCII, one could use ï to indicate that it is not to be merged with the following vowel -- as in French and English. Within the pure ASCII, I am not aware of an elegant solution although the h could be inserted to indicate separation.)
  8. The character "e" is an exception to the above rules for ia/ja etc.: first, it occurs so often that it makes sense to drop the "i" in front of it after a consonant: metkij (меткий), setka (сетка) -- but jexali (ехали), ujexali (уехали). "j" is preserved after vowels -- to ensure a uniformity of spelling of grammatically important word endings: krasnaja (красная), krasnoje (красное).
    Second, unlike "a", "u", "o", the character "e" never occurs in "hard" form (the first sound of etot -- этот) after consonants in native Russian words -- which justifies this rule. The only exceptions are foreign borrowings (temp). However, "e" is hard when it begins the word; compare: etot (этот) and jexal (ехал).
  9. The remaining combination is "sch": toschij (тощий), buduschij (будущий); but sqastje (счастье), sqot (счёт). The sound is the same but the traditional Russian spelling may either use one character (corresponding to "sch" in this system), or two "s"+"q". If one emphasizes correspondence with the traditional Russian spelling, then using "x", "q" and "sch" as recommended above avoids all ambiguity.
    Importance of words like sqot (счёт, count) made me preserve correspondence with the traditional spelling. Moreover, unlike the case with "e" where we dealt with a purely phonetical phenomenon, here the etymology is involved.
  10. There is no need to write the cumbersome combinations -tsia (-тся) and -tjsia (-ться) at the end of words. I recommend the phonetic -ca: kusajeca (кусается), kusaca (кусаться). Prosto i poniatno. 
    The ending -tca would be in the spirit of some XVIII century writers, e.g. Aleksandr Suvorov. Not a bad variant.

A teperj uprazhnenija

Zametjte, kakaja toqnaja zvukoperedaqa.

The statistics available by now confirms that learning even as few new rules as listed above is an almost impossible task for an adult homo sapiens -- almost every user makes some systematic exception to the above rules; note that the exceptions are different with different users.
But it is comforting to observe that a number of people use most of the rules, at least in messages addressed to me. And one person follows it exactly.

Quite interestingly, one my former correspondent (a lady), having studied my recommendations -- and having never used anything even closely resembling a systematic spelling before -- was not satisfied with the choices I made and devised her own system: she simply reassigned the difficult Russian characters to ASCII in a random (and, in my view, somewhat schizophrenic) fashion -- like "w" for "tviordyj znak" and "j" for the first vowel in "dyrka". But I consoled myself that the lady's spelling became at least systematic ...

Avant-garde variation  of the system

One could treat the sounds rendered as "c" and "q" in the above system as hard and soft variants of the same sound denoted by, say, "c": caplia (цапля) and ciashka (чашка), as in Italian. The same rule would then be adopted for "sh" and "sch": shestj (шесть) and shielj (щель). But I dare not recommend this elegant system for wide use: already "q" may be too much for many.

References

1. L.V. Scherba "Teorija russkogo pisjma" [Theory of Russian writing], Leningrad, "Nauka", 1983 (the USSR Academy of Sciences, Institute of the Russian Language). -- The only source I am aware of which focuses on the Russian system of writing specifically.

2. "Russkaja grammatika" [Russian Grammar], vol.1 (the USSR Academy of Sciences, Institute of the Russian Language), Moscow, "Nauka", 1982. -- The most authoritative source on Russian phonetics.

3. T.S.Tixomirova "Poljskij jazyk. (Jazyki mira)", [The Polish language. (Languages of the world)] Moscow University Press, 1978. -- The Polish language is closest to Russian among the Slavic languages which use the Latin character set.

4. <can't find my textbook of Chinese>

5. The mathematician I mentioned above is V.A.Uspenskij. He read a course of math at the Department of philology of the Moscow State University for a number of years. The paper in which he deals with the Russian spelling is being republished in his "Trudy po nematematike", vol. 1.

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Fyodor V. Tkachov

Last update 2002-03-23