What were the obstacles to adoption of ISO 9:1995 in Ukraine?

Question

ISO 9 provides lossless one to one mapping of Cyrillic characters to Latin characters. Many post-Soviet countries, including Belarus and Russian Federation had adopted it as ГОСТ 7.79-2000.

I wonder why it was not adopted in Ukraine. Instead we have постано́ва (regulation) by Ukrainian government which contains somewhat controversial (and lossy) mapping. It doesn't even mention previously active _{(or still active?)} standard for transliteration – ГОСТ 16876-71.

While researching this I've stumbled upon second draft of reworked transliteration standard. The most interesting part in it is the answer of Ministry of internal affairs in which they point to ICAO requirements for machine readable travel documents, that is (page 18):

To achieve global interoperability, the primary and secondary identifiers in the MRZ shall be printed using upper-case OCR-B characters, illustrated in Figure 4, without diacritical marks, and conform to the number of character positions available. As such, names in the MRZ are represented differently from those in the VIZ. The issuing State or organization shall transliterate national characters using only the allowed OCR-B characters and/or truncate, as specified in the form factor specific Parts 4 to 7 of Doc 9303. Transliteration tables for the most commonly used Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic families of languages are provided in Section 6.

Those characters are A-Z, 0-9 and <.

It seems to me that authors of the regulation tried to achieve 100% compatibility with ICAO requirements. If so, then the question is why the ICAO regulations should supersede our national standard? Not to mention that countries that adopted ISO 9 should've confirm to ICAO anyway.

Answer 1

ISO 9 is not popular due to use of diacritics (not available in ukrainian keyboard layouts). Additionally ГОСТ 7.79 Система B (ISO 9 variant) has some references to ukrainian specifics, but it failed to be abopted in Ukraine. Most probable reason is poor phonetical equivalent for some of the characters:

• y` for и - y in transliteration represent sound j (й), and grave accent represent soft sign (ь).
• cz, с for ц - z in transliteration represent letter z (з) on its own.
• shh for щ - sh in transliteration reprezent sh (ш) and extra h has no phonetic meaning.

FYI, for ГОСТ 16876-71 - there was an attempt to have its ukrainian variant, but it failed.

You should keep in mind contexts, where transliteration is used in Ukraine:

• The primary one is formal documents, i.e. passports. ICAO requirements are essential іn passport. Additionally transliteration rules are only a baselaine since owner of the passport has the right to introduce corrections to her transliterated name with significant reasons, such as: transliterations in earlier documents, national transcribing tradition, etc.
• Other transliteration cases (for instance geographical names) are of smaller significance to average person (including governamet officials, who adopted regulation), and thus passport is the most essential transliteration usecase being cared for.