Scripts

[Gerard Huet]

Voila qu'on cause franc,ais dans le poste, maintenant!
/What a surprise to hear french in this forum!

Les rosbifs voudraient qu'on traduise, je ne sais quoi leur repondre
/Dominique Thillaud's transaction, in a nutshell, is that languages exist
before their writing conventions, and thus one should not expect revelations
from the writing forms. He gives funny interpretations of various 
transcriptions of the pra.nava (Om etc) to push his point. I see no reason 
however to translate in english other people's transactions in full.

Je m'excuse d'ailleurs vis-a-vis de mes correspondants francophones de faire
cette traduction partielle sans leur autorisation
/Then Francois Voegeli remarks, in connection to roman transcription of
sanskrit, that actually an international convention was agreed upon at the
Xth Orientalist Congress in Geneva in 1894, involving a modest amount of
diacritics. He then remarks that it should not be a terribly difficult task
for computer scientists to implement this convention.

This is indeed an important new (to me) information on this transcription
topic: what is exactly this convention, is it obsolete or is it close to
actual indologist usage, what is the distance between this convention and
say ITRANS, does it propose solutions to vedic letters and accents, does
it work to the extension of devanagari to hindi, etc etc.
Waiting for informed opinions on these topics
/En esperant que les personnes bien informees se manifesteront

Gerard Huet