Guest guest Posted October 20, 2002 Report Share Posted October 20, 2002 Why can we not unify to a single transliteration of sanskrit? Surely the ugliest is the Kyoto form, which represents the palatal nasal as "J", so that "jnana" becomes "jJana". There are worse examples I could cite, but just wish for now to remind Sanskritists of the horrible transliterative system that made, for half a century, "Beijing" into "Peking". My own proposal is simple: a A i I u U eR ER eL (eLL) ai AI au AU aM a: ka kha ga gha n;a cha chha ja jha n'a Ta Tha Da Dha Na ta tha da dha na pa pha ba bha ma sha Sha sa ha What could be simpler than that? ===== ____________________ Post your free ad now! http://personals..ca Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted October 21, 2002 Report Share Posted October 21, 2002 Some of Jiva Das's scheme is similar to Itrans scheme, which is fairly intuitive, and has been widely used. It is a variant of the Velthuis scheme. If there is an internet standard (outside of the scholarly community), it is itrans, with numerous Sanskrit and Hindi documents in it on the web. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucgadkw/members/transliteration/html/translit.ht ml There is another scheme which in some sense is even more intuive to Indians, this is used by epatra.com. Some parts of the Harvard-Kyoto transliteration scheme do look odd. Outside of the academics, the questions comes up quite frequently among overseas Indians. The younger Indians raised overseas are not familiar with Devanagari, anything intended for them (Sanskrit/hindi prayers, words of Sanskrit origin) needs to be translated. My experiments with children suggested that a scheme needs to be simple. I have used a scheme that used bold and italic fonts, that can be used by children fairly easily (for reading). Yashwant INDOLOGY, jiva das <sadavij> wrote: > Why can we not unify to a single transliteration of > sanskrit? > Surely the ugliest is the Kyoto form, which > represents the palatal nasal as "J", so that "jnana" > becomes "jJana". There are worse examples I could > cite, but just wish for now to remind Sanskritists of > the horrible transliterative system that made, for > half a century, "Beijing" into "Peking". > My own proposal is simple: > > a A i I u U eR ER eL (eLL) ai AI au AU aM a: > > ka kha ga gha n;a > cha chha ja jha n'a > Ta Tha Da Dha Na > ta tha da dha na > pa pha ba bha ma > sha Sha sa ha > > What could be simpler than that? > > ===== > > > ____________________ > Post your free ad now! http://personals..ca Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted October 21, 2002 Report Share Posted October 21, 2002 A transliteration similar to Harvard-Kyoto method, is working for Tamil as well. For example, the CTamil list from Paris uses the transliteration: http://www.services.cnrs.fr/wws/info/ctamil Click the highlighted "Here" to see some minor variants. Regards, N. Ganesan INDOLOGY, phillip.ernest@u... wrote: > > > On Sat, 19 Oct 2002, jiva das wrote: > > > What could be simpler than that? > > Um, for example, R instead of eR (which obscures the fact that R is a > vowel); e and ai instead of ai and AI (what could be less simple than the > latter); ca and cha instead of cha and chha; and so on. > > > Why can we not unify to a single transliteration of > > sanskrit? > > Because we love to bicker over such trivialities, as your reply will > demonstrate. > > But really, Jiva, there is already more or less of a working consensus on > systems of transliteration. I don't think it is regarded by most > Sanskritists as a serious problem. With all due respect, your proposed > system, idiosyncratic and awkward, is not much of a help. > > Glad to see you onlist. There is a lot to talk about. > > P. Ernest Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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