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Nice idea, but please give it a name that makes the language easy to discuss and search for.

There's no way I'm going to work on Monday and discussing: 'did you see that new language that I have no idea how it's pronounced that was on HN?'

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Almost all other languages have ASCII names. How do you think South Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, etc refer to them? They figured it out, just like you would, if you wanted to.

ASCII may be American in origin, but it's become the global standard, and it's all we have in common. Even Japanese keyboards have ASCII character input.

The name of something makes a big difference in the USA though. If it sounds ridiculous or has a non-obvious pronunciation, people won't take it seriously.

Rationalize all you want...the issue makes it a non-starter for many people.

I doubt name makes a bigger difference than usefulness.

A lot of the English language is a showcase of non-obvious pronunciations (ex: "finite" [fi-night] vs. infinite [in-fee-nith]), so that seems like a strange complaint.

"ci" or "cito". As in http://cito.sourceforge.net

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