| 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.