Re: [PATCH] Locales: Cyrillic -> ASCII transliteration table [BZ #2872] re-submission for 2.29

[Marko Myllynen <myllynen at redhat dot com>]

Hi,

On 2018-10-09 01:04, Rafal Luzynski wrote:
> 
> Particularly, I think that those rules will not be helpful at all for
> the languages which use neither Latin nor Cyrillic alphabet.

This is certainly a very good point.

> If you refer to other languages than Russian which also use the Cyrillic
> alphabet but need a different transliteration rules than Russian for
> the same characters then it is OK for me now.  I am afraid that the iconv
> algorithm does not handle such case.  Of course, we should add this missing
> feature eventually but I do not volunteer to do it now.

Yes, this would be needed for correct transliteration of different
languages, and this might be quite a bit of work. There's also the case
of transliteration and character sets, consider the transliteration
examples from https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siirtokirjoitus:

Russian:        Борис Николаевич Ельцин
Int'l:          Boris Nikolaevič Elʹcin
Finnish:        Boris Nikolajevitš Jeltsin
French:         Boris Nikolaïevitch Ieltsine
Phonetic (IPA): [bɐˈrʲis nʲɪkɐˈlaɪvʲɪtɕ ˈjelʲtsɨn]

For French you'll get the correct transliteration with iconv by using -t
ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT, for Finnish with -t ISO-8859-15//TRANSLIT but it's
not so obvious how to get the above kind transliteration for ISO 9
international or especially for the phonetic case.

One thing that might be helpful here could be something like:

$ echo ж | LC_ALL=fi_FI.UTF-8 iconv -f UTF-8 -t UTF-8//TRANSLIT_FORCE
ž

That is, force transliteration of each character (if defined) even if
it's part of the target character set. AFAICS this is not currently
possible.

> But, while at this, is there anything that stops are from adding transliteration
> rules for additional Cyrillic characters not used in Russian but used in
> other languages?

This would probably make sense.

FWIW, for Finnish the diff for Russian to be applied in the locale on
top of translit_cyrillic (ISO 9) rules would be something like below, I
still need to check whether there are rules needed for other languages
than Russian that could be added (I hope to submit a proper patch
against fi_FI shortly after translit_cyrillic has landed):

<U0446> "<U0074><U0073>"
<U0447> "<U0074><U0161>";"<U0074><U0073><U0068>"
<U0448> "<U0161>";"<U0073><U0068>"
<U0449> "<U0161><U0074><U0161>";"<U0073><U0068><U0074><U0073><U0068>"
<U044A> ""
<U044C> ""
<U044D> "<U0065>"
<U044E> "<U006A><U0075>"
<U044F> "<U006A><U0061>"
<U0451> "<U006A><U006F>"

Thanks,

-- 
Marko Myllynen