--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "David Starner" <prosfilaes@...> wrote:

> On 10/11/06, Richard Wordingham <richard@...> wrote:
> > I suppose technology-induced Romanisation should
> > become a thing of the past.

> Just about any
> system that can handle the ii with double-breve used in LoC
> transliteration of Russian can handle Russian.

I wasn't thinking of such 'scientific' transliterations. Indeed, some
transliterations are more difficult to type than the original!

> How often is romanisation technology induced, though?

What I had in mind is cases where one has to communicate using an
ASCII-based or similar medium. The two examples I had in mind were
Romabama, a scheme for Burmese, and the type of Romanisation of Thai
that seemed to be appearing in SMS messages. However, Romabama seems
to be more restricted than I thought, and it appears that the latter
is more used for communication between native and non-native, probably
overseas and probably struggling, Thai speakers.

For the case of people talking about another language,
technology-induced Romanisation and particularly ASCIIfication is
easier to find. There are the various IPA ASCIIfications (do they
count as writing systems for any language?); people on forums
dedicated to discussing Thai as a foreign language resort to
transliteration because of browser (and keyboard!) limitations as well
as because of laziness or consideration for those who don't know the
script; Sanskritists have the Harvard-Kyoto ASCIIfication for
Sanskrit; and soc.culture.thai had its own complete system for Thai
transcription, though it's clear that many would have used Thai script
rather than transcription had they been communicating by scanned
images rather than text.

Richard.