I think the comparison made by the author is unfortunate because of their lack of context of Russian transliteration. I speak Chinese and have some Russian language understanding so I feel I can give a better explanation:
Imagine you had no Cyrillic keyboard and had to instead type in transliteration. So that if you want to obtain the following sentence:
Все люди рождаются свободными и равными в своем достоинстве и правах.
You'd have to type this instead:
Vse lyudi rozhdayutsya svobodnymi i ravnymi v svoyem dostoinstve i pravakh.
Not so bad, millions of people do it every day. However, this only works because the transliteration system is based on mapping common values of the Latin alphabet into Russian. So the cognitive distance is not so bad.
Now, let's imagine instead, that you'd be forced to use a transliteration that was originally used based on mapping English language pronounciation values, such that you'd have to type something like:
Vsay lyoodee rogedahyootseea svoughboughdnuhmee ee rahvnuhmee v svohyam doughstougheenstvay ee prahvahch.
That's closer to the idea of what the typing of Cantonese in Pinyin instead of Jyutping would feel like.
Related: I had a Bulgarian co-worker years ago. She said growing up, there was wide-spread use of both Cyrillic and Roman characters for Bulgarian language. She said she was always able to express herself using either character set. However, I don't know anything about the cultural context of Russian. Naively, I assume it is strictly Cyrillic. It would be nice if some native Russian speakers can comment about transliteration systems used on PCs.
yeah but I’d imagine it’s not a Russian keyboard. Russian characters look like йуукенгшщзхфывапролджэячсмитьбю. You’d have a hard time writing in English using them
I had a Russian housemate in London who exclusively used an English keyboard because he liked that model and it wasn't available in Cyrillic. He gave me the impression that a lot of people in Russia used English keyboards. But then he was an English-speaking programmer, and not representative of the "average Russian".
The impression i get is that you can write Russian in Roman text, and most Russians will understand you, but if you write English with Russian characters, very few people will understand you
In the 90s, before wide adoption of Unicode, there were several competing encodings for Russian in ASCII, such as KOI-8, Windows and others. In some cases, it was just easier to type Russian in English language as it was spoken, which was called "translit", from transliteration: naprimer, vot tak. Later, as first mobile phones got wide adoption in late 90s and early 00s, they, too, didn't yet have russian keyboards, and translit was once again used, although in modified form, with wider use of digits in place of letters.
Imagine you had no Cyrillic keyboard and had to instead type in transliteration. So that if you want to obtain the following sentence:
Все люди рождаются свободными и равными в своем достоинстве и правах.
You'd have to type this instead:
Vse lyudi rozhdayutsya svobodnymi i ravnymi v svoyem dostoinstve i pravakh.
Not so bad, millions of people do it every day. However, this only works because the transliteration system is based on mapping common values of the Latin alphabet into Russian. So the cognitive distance is not so bad.
Now, let's imagine instead, that you'd be forced to use a transliteration that was originally used based on mapping English language pronounciation values, such that you'd have to type something like:
Vsay lyoodee rogedahyootseea svoughboughdnuhmee ee rahvnuhmee v svohyam doughstougheenstvay ee prahvahch.
That's closer to the idea of what the typing of Cantonese in Pinyin instead of Jyutping would feel like.