Quote:
Originally Posted by xendula
The is no transliteration that I know of. Funny, I always use ss for ß, since that's also what I would use when capitalizing (there is no capital ß).
Unicode solves some things, especially larger newspapers now use diacritics (maybe they now have Romanian keyboards?), but most bloggers still don't.
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We had such problems in the early 1990s - I think ö, ü, ä and õ were mostly fine (although õ could create some problems), but even national newspapers were at first when switching over to computers forced to use zh for ž and sometimes even sh for š. Fortunately that era didn't last long.
Nowadays it's only people who have moved abroad and haven't realised that on most computers you can switch keyboard layouts (and aren't familiar with the Alt+numpad combinations on full keyboards, don't have a full keyboard or can't be bothered) who don't use proper letters - but outside telegrams in the days gone by, I've never seen anyone use oe for ö or ae for ä etc. Generally people just use the letters without umlauts (it's not really a "letter + umlaut" combination in Estonian, ö, ä, ü and ö are separate letters in the alphabet, as are š and ž) as it's clear enough from the context what they stand for, but there is also a tendency by some to use y for ü, 2 for ä, 8 for ö and 6 for õ.
Phone keyboards, even pre-touchscreen or qwerty-keyboard days, included proper letters ages ago - they're perhaps more cumbersome to use, but they're there.
As for spelling reforms - I'm not sure we've ever had a proper official "reform"; it looks like it's been a gradual change. There's a very noticeable change between the current spelling and even late 19th / early 20the century spelling, though, as the people prescribing spelling and grammar rules for us before 20th century tended to be Germans.
Modern Estonian is almost completely phonetical - one major difference with e.g. German (but also most other Indo-European languages I'm familiar with) is that in Estonian, long sounds are generally written with a double letter. I'm fairly sure this change went into effect already at some point during the 19th century, but earlier texts written in Estonian can be very hard to read, both because of the "unnatural" spelling & grammar and because earlier texts tended to be written down by Germans. Once you get used to double consonants actually denoting short vowel sounds and single consonants denoting long vowel sounds, it's easier (the language itself hasn't changed that much), but I do struggle somewhat with earlier texts.
We have the occasional minor changes now, mostly in the spelling or declension of specific words (and some changes regarding capitalisation of proper names and place names that function as descriptive terms / indeclinable adjectives), but again, this tends to be an on-going process, not part of any major reforms.