Russian Latin Alphabet

 

Romanisation of Russian language is often prone to some rather weird letter combination to express sounds that are not present in English language. This fact makes idea of adopting Latin alphabet for Russian language seem like stupid idea.

However, this does not have to be the case. By borrowing some ideas from Western Slavic alphabet such as Czech or Serbo-Croatian one can create a very simple and elegant form of Latin Russian Alphabet that is much simpler and more streamlined than native Cyrillic one.

All problematic letters can easily be spelled using just two simple tricks: use of coron (a little tick above the letter and use of 'J' in front of vowels.

'J' is pronounced like in German, Czech or other Eastern European languages, that is like 'Y'. This letter will be used frequently so it has to be easy to write be easy on eyes. 'J' is much more suitable for this role compared to 'Y'. 

Using 'J' also frees up 'Y' for hard fricative 'E' sound that is different from German 'J'. Using the same character for two distinct sounds creates confusion and this solution eliminates it.

In addition to being a short 'I', 'J' is used in front of every other vowel to create a softer version of the vowel. 'A' and 'Ya' (traditional romanisation) are treated as distinct letters in Russian language, but arguably one can call 'Ya' a composite sound of short 'I' and 'A'. If you apply this logic to other complex Russian vowels they all can be written in the same consistent manner of short 'I' in front of another vowel, that will reduce a total number of letters in the alphabet and make writing simpler. 

Because of that short 'I' will be used frequently and thus a simple easy to write and read character is needed to represent it, hence, I chose 'J' rather than 'Y'. Since 'I' is used for full 'I' it's only fitting that a similarly looking letter represent its modified short form. 

Second is use of coron (a small tick above the letter) to represent consonants that are absent in Standard Latin alphabet. People familiar with Skoda car brand can notice a small tick above letter 'S'. This tick is a standard feature of Czech language that is used to denote that this letter reads 'Sh' rather than 'S'. Czech language uses this coron above other letters, including 'C' in the very name of their country. I too used coron for extra consonants that exist in Russian language and used to be written as complex diphthongs like 'Zh', 'Ch', 'Ts' and even horrendous quad-thong 'Shch'. 'Shch' can now be written with only two corons above simple 'S', 'S' with single coron is 'Sh'.

Finally, as a bonus I brought 'X' into alphabet to write words that normally use 'KS' in Russian. 'Max' and 'Xenia' will finally be written like in Western languages instead of writing them as 'Maks' and 'Ksenia'.

Overall, I think the alphabet I created is not only better than traditional romanisation but even better than traditional Cyrillic alphabet. Sure, it might take time to get used to it, but it is certainly more convenient way to write Russian than what is currently used.