typing Sanskrit an other Indian languages

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

On Sat, 7 Sep 1996, Leslaw Borowski wrote:

> 
> I) Is it useful to have a Roman script transcription of Indic languages for 
> presentation (on a computer screen or in a printed form)? 
> I think it is. Reasons: 

I agree that it is useful to have Roman script transcription of Indic
languages for computer screens. However, I think we must remember that the
computer screen is, for all purposes, a different medium than paper. This
has implications for some of the points below.  

> II) What features should such a system of transcription possess?
> I think it should:
> 
> 1) be close to traditional (especially internationally accepted) systems of
> transcription for languages in question.

This may be desirable, but here it is important to remember that the
traditional system of transcription is meant for printed matter. Computers
being more than a medium to present text, it is conceivable that a scheme
evolved for computer screens differs widely in some repects from the
accepted transliteration schemes. 


> * It would be no major problem if the same sounds were rendered by
> different sets af signs in different languages (that is their respective
> systems of transcriptions) especially when the languages are either very
> different or spoken by people who leave far away from one another. You can
> always mark the language the word belong to in case of doubt eg. skr.
> 
> 2) It should not go against internationally accepted conventions of using
> Roman script (like usage of capital letters). Let us not get mistaken by
> names like INTRANS which are rather expression of aspiration (and tool of 
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

You are talking of ITRANS, I suppose. 

> promotion) than real respect for international conventions.

I beg to differ, especially on the use of capital letters. If an entire
text is to be transcribed, there is no reason why conventions of Roman
script should be strictly adhered to. The Roman script becomes simply a
convenient medium to present a text in a non-European language. 

Conventions regarding the use of capital letters are not uniform. In
English, one does not use the capital letter to begin every noun. In
German, I still see the use of capital letters for every proper and common
noun. I don't know how it is in Swedish or some other European language,
but I can generally identify that a scientific paper is by an author from
Europe, if it uses capital letters in words like "Sulphuric Acid" or
"Carbon", even in the middle of a sentence. These words would not be
capitalized by British, Indian and American authors, unless they occur at
the beginning of the sentence. 

Given these differences in conventions among the traditional users of
Roman script, I see nothing problematic with using capital letters for
transcription, especially if there are easy software solutions that
convert the transcribed text to an Indic script. These conventions are
still ad-hoc, but the governing motive is ease of use, rather than any
ambition for self-promotion. 

For example, in a web-page that talks of advaita and Sankara, it is
tedious to use an extra sign (either before or after the s) every time.
The resulting text also looks awkward. Neither ";Sa.nkara" nor "S;an.kara" 
is very appealing. It is easier to simply denote it as "S", and reserve 
the lower-case letter "s" for the sibilant. This is important because
there is no key combination which will allow me to put the acute symbol on
top of the letter s. This is not a problem for the print media. Right here
is a major difference between computer key-boards and conventional print
media. Similarly with the long vowels and the cerebral consonants. It
becomes tedious to write "ii;sa", "aananda", "tiirtha", "ma.tha" etc. when
I can easily write "ISa", "Ananda", "tIrtha", "maTha" and so on. You
simply mark the language as Sanskrit or Hindi or whatever else, and cease
to expect European conventions for the use of the Roman script.

This peculiar use of capital letters, if accepted on a popular level, will
just become another convention for computer-oriented use of the Roman
script for Indic languages. There is no reason why transliteration
conventions developed in the context of print media should restrict those
developed for computer screens. For the sake of continuity, the existing
conventions may be taken as normative, but need not become prescriptive.


> 4) It should be relatively easy to type for many people (and not only to
> a few martyrs who produce devanagari electronic texts and differ largely
> in their ways; my high regards and thanks to them for their benedictine work) 

The use of capital letters satisfies this criterion too, does it not?
There is no introduction of extra characters to serve as diacritical
marks, and no bothering with whether the mark comes before or after a
letter. All one has to do is to hold down the shift key, and the
assignation of characters becomes very logical. a = a , shift-a = A, and
so on.

Regards, 

S. Vidyasankar