Harvard-Kyoto

[Birgit Kellner]

At 16:22 1996-06-28 BST, Harry Falk wrote:

>good idea to initiate a Vedic bibliography - but using the Harvard-
>Kyoto transcription would result in a nightmare. Any z in a personal
>name or non-Skt term would be converted to /s, Jolly would end up
>as ~nolly etc. The usual aa>A conversion gives similar trouble if
>you think of Staal or Fujii. It might be advisible to use the Vienna
>codes or create something new, but any standard which does not lend
>itself to automatic conversion should be banished.

Any convention which uses either interpunctional marks (e.g.
Tuebingen-Zuerich) or commonly used Latin characters to encode diacritics
will face problems in case of automatic conversion, as soon as other
languages than Sanskrit are used in the file. 

As I have done before, I would like to jump in and bluntly advertise the
"@-convention", which we use in Hiroshima, and which quite a few other
people in Japan (or Vienna) use for transmitting their e-texts. Basically,
every diacritical character is replaced by the base-letter, followed by an
ad-mark (e.g. long a = a@; cerebral t=t@). There are a few exceptions where
ambiguity occurs (e.g. with the n's and the s's or the vocalic r's, where
other base-letters have to be used). 

We plan to use this convention in our - currently under construction -
Web-page, where we will - amongst other things - collect fragments from
pra at ma@n at a-texts. Admittedly, it's not easy to read and takes a little time
to get used to (as does Devanagari:)) , but when texts are supposed to be
down-loaded and used in different environments, it is definitely the best I
have seen so far. 




Birgit Kellner
Department for Indian Philosophy
University of Hiroshima