Poverty -Reply

[l.m.fosse at easteur-orient.uio.no]

>I'm also curious about this.  I thought CSX encoding used sh for the first
>and shh for the second.  The only table I've seen for 7-bit ICSS encoding
>comes from itrans documentation by Avinash Chopde.
>

There are several ways of encoding Sanskrit. The CSX uses certain ASCII
numbers to represent special Sanskrit characters, and the font page will
ensure that your screen shows the correct character. In other words: One
ASCII number for each character. Other methods use composite characters.
The main thing is that the system allows easy conversion from one format to
another, so that the scholar can utilize all sorts of analytical programs
and sorting mechanisms. Z for sh (first s) is another way of representing
this character by means of another single character. The following table
shows three different solutions for representing the s'es. (TZ-format =
Tuebingen-Zuerich format)

        CSX     TZ     Harvard-Kyoto
sh      247     /s      z
shh     249     .s      S
s       s       s       s

There are other  ways of transliterating Sanskrit as well, but only two
basic principles: Either one ASCII character = once Sanskrit character, or
two (or more) ASCII characters = one Sanskrit character.

Best regards,

Lars Martin Fosse



Lars Martin Fosse
Research Fellow
Department of East European
and Oriental Studies
P. O. Box 1030, Blindern
N-0315 OSLO Norway

Tel: +47 22 85 68 48
Fax: +47 22 85 41 40

E-mail: l.m.fosse at easteur-orient.uio.no