Word splitting & hyphenation conventions in roman transliteration

[Rolf Koch]

nagari taddhi means tat hi  (and not tad dhi)
nagari tattvasti means tat tu asti (and not tat tv asti), etc


greetings

John Smith wrote:

> On Sun, 7 Feb 1999, harry spier wrote:
>
> > Are there guidelines or accepted standards among Sanskritists for the
> > splitting of sanskrit sentences and the use of hyphenation in roman
> > transliteration.  In examining nine different editions of the Bhagavad
> > Geeta, each one split the words in the sentences differently, and each
> > one used hyphenation differently.  None mirrored the accompanying
> > devanagari script without additional breaks in the sentence.  Any
> > guidelines I could receive from professional Sanskritists would be
> > greatly appreciated.
>
> The convention in Roman is the same as in Devanagari etc.: put spaces
> between words where it is possible to do so. However, the fundamental
> differences between the Indian scripts and Roman mean that the results are
> not the same in both cases. In Nagari, if a word ends in a consonant
> (excluding visarga and anusvara), it must be written joined up to the next
> word; in Roman this is not the case. So AsId rAjA appears in Nagari as one
> "word", in Roman as two. In Roman the only joined-up words are ones where
> vowel sandhi has fused two vowels into one: tathaiva etc.
>
> Note that this practice results in some unpronounceable words being
> written separately in Roman: tad dhy asti, tat tv asti etc.
>
> Note also that if it is desired to convert from a Roman-style version to a
> Nagari-style version, all that is needed is to remove every space
> following a consonant. The reverse conversion, however, cannot be done
> automatically.
>
> Hyphenation is sometimes used as a guide to compound-formation, but this
> is generally restricted to language manuals and the like: it is not normal
> to hyphenate Sanskrit texts in Roman.
>
> John Smith
>
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