[INDOLOGY] ISO15919 and case insensitivity

[Rolf Heinrich Koch]

Long e (ē) and long o (ō) are common also in Sinhalese and they are part 
of the ISO15919 transliteration standard and included in all 
unicode-fonts. So people can use this letters without limitation.


Am 20.06.2019 um 17:33 schrieb George Hart via INDOLOGY:
> In light of the fact that Dravidian languages have both short and long 
> e and o, it would be helpful to many scholars who use texts in Tamil, 
> Malayalam, Telugu and Kannada if Sanskrit e and o were marked with a 
> macron (ē, ō) in standard transliteration. The lack of such indication 
> causes all sorts of problems when quoting from those languages, 
> especially since they all often use Sanskrit words intermixed with 
> native ones. George Hart
>
>> On Jun 20, 2019, at 9:24 AM, Arlo Griffiths via INDOLOGY 
>> <indology at list.indology.info <mailto:indology at list.indology.info>> wrote:
>>
>> Dear colleagues,
>>
>> It is possible to obtain some responses to the questions that Dániel 
>> asked on our joint behalf? It would be greatly appreciated.
>>
>> Many thanks, and best wishes,
>>
>> Arlo Griffiths
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> *From:*INDOLOGY <indology-bounces at list.indology.info 
>> <mailto:indology-bounces at list.indology.info>> on behalf of Dániel 
>> Balogh via INDOLOGY <indology at list.indology.info 
>> <mailto:indology at list.indology.info>>
>> *Sent:*Monday, June 10, 2019 10:52 AM
>> *To:*indology
>> *Subject:*[INDOLOGY] ISO15919 and case insensitivity
>> Dear All,
>> I believe some members of the esteemed community reading this were 
>> involved in drawing up the ISO15919 transliteration standard. I would 
>> be very happy to correspond with someone, here or off-list, about 
>> some generic issues and at the moment one particular question.
>> The generic issues would pertain to using a modified ISO standard in 
>> web and hardcopy publications, including some modifications that 
>> prevent us from making a "claim of conformance" as per section 2 of 
>> the standard. Beyond the practical issue of having to explain to our 
>> readers where we deviate from the standard, I see no problem 
>> associated with this, but I may be missing something. At any rate, a 
>> proliferation of idiosyncratic transliteration systems is not 
>> desirable, which leads to the second set of generic issues: by whom 
>> and how is the ISO standard maintained at present, and is there any 
>> chance of proposing slight modifications/addenda/special cases to it?
>> The particular question right now is this. The standard explicitly 
>> says that all transliterations must be case insensitive (Section 8.1 
>> Rule 1). Some of us, however, are thinking of using uppercase Roman 
>> characters to transliterate 1. final consonants represented in 
>> historic scripts by special "halanta" character forms (instead of the 
>> addition of a virāma sign), and 2. initial/full vowels.
>> The latter could be made clear using the disambiguation sign already 
>> codified in the standard (e.g. transliterating प्रउग as pra:uga), but 
>> we feel that using Roman uppercase for both these phenomena is 
>> intuitively similar to the practice of the original script. [Not 
>> directly relevant to the question at hand is that we would also 
>> introduce an additional symbol for transliterating the explicit 
>> virāma sign to handle final or conjunct consonants created with such 
>> a sign.]
>> We would use this notation for epigraphic material, but as far as I 
>> can see it would be equally advantageous in codicology where a 
>> diplomatic transliteration is desirable. Unambiguously (and in some 
>> cases redundantly) differentiating final vowel forms is useful not 
>> only in cases where these are used as a means of text segmentation 
>> (e.g. the final consonant of a verse quarter is inscribed using a 
>> special form, followed by the initial consonant of the next quarter, 
>> without an intervening punctuation sign but with the clear intent of 
>> representing the yati in writing), but also where partially legible 
>> text precedes or follows a lacuna (e.g. occasionally a legible vowel 
>> mātrā is attached to a lost/illegible consonant, and it is desirable 
>> to make it clear in the transliteration that the vowel read is not a 
>> full vowel akṣara).
>> Many thanks in advance for any enlightening comments, and my 
>> apologies for going into possibly unnecessary detail on the why and how.
>> Daniel
>> _______________________________________________
>> INDOLOGY mailing list
>> INDOLOGY at list.indology.info <mailto:INDOLOGY at list.indology.info>
>> indology-owner at list.indology.info 
>> <mailto:indology-owner at list.indology.info>(messages to the list's 
>> managing committee)
>> http://listinfo.indology.info <http://listinfo.indology.info/>(where 
>> you can change your list options or unsubscribe)
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> INDOLOGY mailing list
> INDOLOGY at list.indology.info
> indology-owner at list.indology.info (messages to the list's managing committee)
> http://listinfo.indology.info (where you can change your list options or unsubscribe)

-- 
www.rolfheinrichkoch.wordpress.com



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://list.indology.info/pipermail/indology/attachments/20190620/58447d1c/attachment.htm>