Mailing list for Indic transliteration schemes

[Anthony P Stone]

I am the Project Leader of a Working Group under the International
Organization for Standardization, responsible for developing
transliteration schemes from Indic scripts 
into Latin script (ISO/TC46/SC2/WG12, set up in May 1997).

Despite standards like ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode, there will always be a
need for transliteration as long as people do not have the same level of
competence in all scripts, or when they have to deal with mechanical or
computerised equipment which does not provide all the scripts or characters
which they need.

It is intended to make the work of the working group more visible and more
relevant to end users than has been usual in the past.   To enable this,
the electronic mailing list  
Conv-dev has been set up by the Greek national standards body ELOT.   We
hope that this list will attract members who can contribute useful
information and ideas. 

The following scripts are to be covered by this Working Group: 
Assamese, Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Oriya,
Malayalam, Sinhala, Telugu, Tamil.  

The purposes of transliteration to be covered by the standard have still to
be decided, but may include academic publications (both traditional and
electronic), electronic 
transmission of texts, bibliography, geographical names, email, Web
messages, and so on.   Both 8-bit/traditional printing and 7-bit schemes
will be considered.

It will be particularly important that any transliteration scheme in the
standard applies to each of the scripts listed above.   This will involve
the discussion of linguistic 
equivalents in the different scripts.

The Conv-dev mailing list

There are now about 25 subscribers to Conv-dev (which is not restricted to
Devanagari) and we wish to extend this to cover global interests and
expertise in all the scripts shown above.

The purpose of this list is restricted to the development of 
transliteration standards, rather than general discussion on Indic scripts
(however interesting and important).  

Subscribing to the mailing list Conv-dev 

In order to join the list you should be actively involved in using, or
developing, relevant transliteration systems, and should be prepared to
contribute to the list from time to time.

If you wish to join the list, send an email to

          majordomo at elot.gr

with this message in the body of the text:

          subscribe conv-dev your at email.address

(but with your real email address replacing the string your at email.address).

Once you are subscribed, you will receive information about how to post to
the list, how to unsubscribe, etc.

I look forward to seeing new participants on this list. Please feel free to
forward this to anyone else who may be interested in the standardisation
issues, and to send me any queries about the list.
          
Tony Stone                   email: stone_catend at compuserve.com