typing Sanskrit

[Frances Pritchett]

On Thu, 29 Aug 1996, Anshuman Pandey wrote:

> 
> On Thu, 29 Aug 1996 HEIJSTEE at rullet.LeidenUniv.nl wrote:
> 
> > The value `sh' for `x' in Maltese is also found in Catalan and
> > in Sardinian, both Roman languages. For me reason enough not to
> > use the `x' to represent the modified `kh'.
> >
> > Sandra Van der Geer
> 
> This point may have already been expressed, but hasn't 'x' generally been
> used as an alternative for the consonant cluster 'ksh' rather than the
> modified 'kh' in the romanization of SA scripts, especially Devanagari?
> 
> Anshuman Pandey
> 
> ---
> Anshuman Pandey | apandey at u.washington.edu | University of Washington
> 
> 
Surely people don't write "xetra"?  I have never seen this, anyway.  I
have of course seen "Laxmi" but mostly in casual and un-rationalized
usages, not scholarly systems.  In transliterating Urdu, "x" is used in
some systems for the letter "khe," the one in "kaarxaanah" (workshop,
factory).  For us Hindi-Urdu vaale, one big problem is overlap:  the LC
transliteration system uses, for example, an "s" with a dot under it to be
retroflex sh in Hindi, and the letter "svaad" in Urdu.  If people want a
complete representation system for Urdu SOUNDS, they certainly need a
special character for the modified "gh" of the letter "ghain"  (ghazal,
Ghalib).  A complete transliteration of Urdu LETTERS is of course a much
more complex proposition (remember the four letters that all sound like
"z", and the wild-card vowel `ain...) and is perhaps outside the range of
the present thread.