Modified Library of Congress Cyrillic Encoding

David J. Birnbaum (djb@clover.slavic.pitt.edu)
Yulia Chugunova (yulia@clover.slavic.pitt.edu)

Copyright © 1996 by David J. Birnbaum and Yulia Chugunova.
All rights reserved.

The Modified Library of Congress Cyrillic Encoding Vector is optimized for ASCII-based interfaces, such as HTML forms text input fields. The encoding system is based on the "scholarly" transliteration system, modified to cope with the lack of support for diacritics in ASCII. All "scholarly" character codes that do not require diacritics are retained (e.g., c [not ts], x [not kh], j [not i], ja [not ia]). "Scholarly" character codes that require diacritics are replaced by their Library of Congress counterparts where possible (e.g., sh, zh, shch).

Two idiosyncrasies are eh for e oborotnoe and oh for jo. The latter is counter-intuitive, but was required to avoid confusing ohzh 'hedgehog' with jod 'iodine'. Stress is marked by an asterisk (* ) following the stressed vowel. There is no provision for marking secondary stress.

Advantages:

• uses only seven-bit characters (will not interfere with standard HTML characters);
• uses only alphabetic characters for letters (no punctuation or dingbats, except for hard and soft signs);
• based on familiar "scholarly" and Library of Congress transliterations.

Disadvantages:

• does not display Cyrillic;
• some Cyrillic letters are represented by a sequence of Latin letters;
• you cannot search for sh followed by ch (although this sequence can appear in reports); shch will almost always represent a single letter, but a sequence of sh followed by ch does occur in vesnushchatyj and elsewhere;
• upper and lower case are not distinguished for hard and soft signs;
• e obotornoe and jo are not encoded in a familiar or intuitive way.