typing Sanskrit

[Jakub Cejka]

On Thu, 22 Aug 1996, Leslaw Borowski wrote:

> I don't quite understand. 1) You don't have to put diacritical marks BEFORE
> writing a letter (which goes against normal practice)

I wonder what means "normal practice here". My native tongue is one of 
those which use the latin alphabet with various diacritics. On the 
typewriter as well as on the computer one has to pres the diacritics key 
FIRST and then the plain letter key to get the combination of a consonant 
with "hacek", the same with long vowels. I do not know how about the 
other European languages using diacritics, but I guess it's the same. At 
least my old typewriter is a German one and the Umlaut is typed first too.

I wonder how one can say it is unnatural. In handwritten Czech we put 
diacritics afterwards and in typed before and no one complains about 
either way being unnatural.  
Not only the diacritics, note that the Indian scripts write even the 
vowel signs of the syllable-letters (which are somewhat analogical to 
diacritics in fonological scripts) before the consonant sign (short i 
everywhere and e in the East and South). Is that unnatural? 

And in music most of the auxiliary or modificatory signs are written 
before the actual note sign ...  
______________________________________________________________________________
Mr. Jakub Cejka
Dept. of Sanskrit, University of Pune
Ganeshkhind, Pune, India  411 007

e-mail:  jakub at unipune.ernet.in   (till July 97 the latest)