[INDOLOGY] ISO15919 and case insensitivity

Thu Jun 20 16:59:59 UTC 2019

Dear colleagues,

A point of clarification: would the same document ever use both a "halant
variant" of a letter (e.g., the final n of the Kannada script) and the
standard variant followed by a virāma sign? I'm asking because my instinct
would be to simply represent the halant variant of a consonant C as C· (or
whatever sign you're using for the virāma). It's true that the final form
of the letter in Kannada doesn't "look like" a regular n with a virāma, but
then again the letter kh doesn't look like k + h.

I'm sure Dániel knows of it, but in case others don't, an article that Arlo
co-authored with Bob Hudson, Marc Miyake and Julian Wheatley (BEFEO 103
[2017]: 43–205) includes a discussion of adapting the ISO-15919 standards
for Pyu, according to which °V is used for an independent vowel sign and ·
is used for the virāma. I have been using these conventions for diplomatic
transcription. I don't have a strong argument for or against uppercase
letters in transliteration, but here are two weak arguments against it: (1)
uppercase letters are more likely to cause problems in any automated
processing (e.g., replacements or transliteration) especially in
mixed-language text; (2) people sometimes use Western capitalization style
for transliterated text, and even though the use of this style (e.g., in
lists of bibliographic references) will almost never overlap with the
epigraphic and codicological applications Dániel has in mind, we might want
to avoid certain letters changing their meaning across use-cases. For what
it's worth, I often have text in ISO-15919 that I feed into Sanscript to be
transliterated into Indic scripts, and I always downcase the text before
applying the transliteration.

Andrew

On Thu, Jun 20, 2019 at 11:50 AM Tyler Williams via INDOLOGY <
indology at list.indology.info> wrote:

> Dear Dániel (and Arlo),
>
> While I'm afraid that I cannot contribute any answers to your questions, I
> do want to express support for your effort of finding ways to modify
> ISO15919 for epigraphical and codicological material. In addition to the
> issue of initial/full vowels and missing consonant glyphs in manuscripts, I
> frequently run into problems with transliterating manuscript material
> (usually vernacular but sometimes Sanskrit) that 1) uses multiple glyphs
> for the what is ostensibly the same consonant (perhaps the result of
> unstated phonological rules), or 2) in which vowel matras are used appended
> to full vowel glyphs to indicate certain sounds (e.g. dipthongs). This is
> in addition to the numerous challenges posed by transliterating texts
> copied in the Arabic script, which represents morphological distinctions
> orthographically through the use of word breaks, diacritical marks, etc.
>
> All this to say that, should there be a discussion on proposed changes, I
> would be happy to contribute (and learn from others).
>
> Best,
> Tyler
>
> On Thu, Jun 20, 2019 at 6:54 PM Arlo Griffiths via INDOLOGY <
> 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> on behalf of
>> Dániel Balogh via INDOLOGY <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
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