User talk:Chet Gray

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[edit] GOST and scientific transliteration

Hi.

For now, I have reverted your change to GOST 16876-71. I haven't been able to find an authoritative reference, but most of the ones out there use jj to transliterate й (example, example, example). Some also add a "with diacritics" version, which doesn't use the double j.

I think there is also confusion because some references cite the -71 version, but their table has data from newer versions. If you have a better reference, it would be valuable for the article.

I have also resisted putting the modifier letter primes into scientific transliteration tables, because I was worried about browser support. The Unicode standard specifically cautions that one should never assume that a plain prime is not meant to be a modifier letter prime, and the modifier letters' special non-breaking quality is not needed in the table. The modifier letters are strictly more correct, but there is no practical reason to use them in the table. So I think it's safer to just leave the plain primes there, so more readers can enjoy them.

A good test would be whether the modifier letter primes work in MSIE 6 on a Win XP system with no extra fonts installed, but I don't have easy access to MS Windows (Mac user). —Michael Z. 2007-09-27 21:22 Z