Sherwood on Hebrew Transliteration

Every now and then you read something that just makes you go "yuss!"

"I have also used Hebrew as sparingly as possible, but where I have, I have given the Hebrew script and a very rough English transliteration, rather than the conventional transliteration code, because this has always struck me as a highly cryptic sub-language which manages to be both more difficult to read than Hebrew for the Hebrew-reader and, at the same time, about as indecipherable as Hebrew to the non-specialist."

Yvonne Sherwood, 

A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives: The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture, 

CUP, 2000, pp7-8.

I'd say the same, perhaps to a lesser extent about Greek transliteration. I assume the practice began, not for non-specialist readers, but because of the limits of typewriters/typesetting back in the day? I could of course be dead wrong about that. But either way, it is a terrible thing. I have enough trouble learning Greek and Hebrew without having to learn a "highly cryptic sub-language" as well!