[freeciv-data] Re: Russian.ruleset

[Dmitriy Genzel <dg@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> The use of `=EB' to represented the stressed `e' pronounced as 'jo' is
> actually pretty common in the US at least. =20

It may be used by Slavists I suppose, but I haven't seen it used by
Russians in the US. There are at least two reasons for this:

1. The letter "jo" is practically never written in Russian anyway.
Everyone writes "e". You'd be hard pressed to find any place where it is
written as "e" with dots in cyrillic script. If you write
in transliteration, you may write it as "jo", I suppose, but few people
bother.

2. The character you use is not in 7-bit ascii. That makes it very hard to
type, and very confusing to read if you happen to have a russian font
installed, which uses the upper 128 characters to encode cyrillics. Thus
your letter will look like some other (cyrillic) letter inserted in the
middle of latin ones.
> every goes UTF-8, of course, we can do it really properly--but then we
> don't really need to transliterate at all.

Do you really think that most people would be able to read and remember
the name of the city if it's written in cyrillic? Cyrillic is not too bad,
as it has many latin-looking characters, but, say, hebrew or chinese would
be horrible.
=20
> It was renamed Vjatka in 1780, Kirov in 1934, and back to Vjatka 1992.

I am not sure it makes sense to use city names that most Russians wouldn't
recognize, even if they are historic. Is there a general Freeciv policy on
this?
=20
> The UN system uses `=E8' for the "backwards" `e', to denote that the
> preceding consonant is not palatized. My source has a "backwards" `e'
> there, not a Latin-style one.

See my second reason for "yo".

Dmitriy