[INDOLOGY] Revision of ISO 15919 (transliteration of Indic scripts)

Wed Jun 7 09:28:25 UTC 2023

I can no longer resist chiming in; apologies for rambling and for stating
what may be obvious.
The IAST scheme is indeed much more widely used, but I am not at all sure
if future standards should be based on precedent and if counting the number
of existing publications using one standard or another is any help. I think
there are two main reasons why IAST is widely used. One, as Harry Spier has
pointed out, is that the ISO standards are not openly accessible. Without
having any insight into the workings of ISO standards in general, as a
layman I find this frankly ridiculous and if Jan Kučera can apply any
pressure to change this, this restriction should be lifted. The other
principal reason is that characters with an undercircle are supported only
by a very small number of fonts, and even some that do support such
combinations render them poorly. It is thus much more convenient for
everyone, authors to publishers, to stick to underdots (which my spell
checker immediately changed to underdogs!).
That said, there are good reasons *against* IAST too, primarily ambiguity.
That is to say, R and L with an underdot are suitable for representing
vocalic R and L only so long as you are dealing with classical standard
Sanskrit. As soon as Vedic enters the picture, you might use l+underdot for
the retroflex flap as well as for the vocalic L. The retroflex L is also
present in Dravidian languages and Marathi, and in many regional Sanskrit
manuscripts and inscriptions. There is also the (different?) retroflex flap
used e.g. in Hindi and normally transliterated with r+underdot. According
to Wikipedia, IAST uses ḻ (l with line below) for the former kind of
retroflex flap and I have no idea if it uses anything for the latter kind.
That could work, but then how do we transliterate the retroflex central
approximant (ೞ) of some Dravidian languages? One could argue that this is
not required, because we are talking about Sanskrit transliteration. But
ideally, a transliteration system for Sanskrit ought to be able to
transliterate (unambiguously) any language written in a Brāhmī-derived
script. With this, I am entering murky waters and I would rather not go
much further; it would be too much to hope for a system that can really do
this, but perhaps supporting the major modern and premodern languages of
South and Southeast Asia is not a dream. It is theoretically also possible
to agree on language-dependent standards, as is already the case for
instance with e and o, which (in IAST and in a permitted optional variant
of ISO15919) represent long vowels in Sanskrit, but short vowels in
Dravidian languages. The DHARMA project has chosen to follow (and expand
upon) the ISO standard primarily for this reason, because it is better
suited for a textual corpus in a variety of languages.
As for anusvāra as m with overdot or underdot, it seems largely a question
of taste. That said, there is a good rationale for not choosing the
underdot, which it implies some commonality either with vocalic trills or
with retroflex consonants.
On the whole, one question we must ask ourselves is which situation we
would rather live with: the chaos involved in introducing a new standard
that will not immediately, if ever, become the number one global standard -
or the chaos involved in maintaining multiple standards in parallel. Those
who work primarily or only with classical standard Sanskrit may prefer the
latter, as they are not really affected by its drawbacks.
Another relevant question is what can be done to improve and propagate any
standard. IAST is not being actively maintained at all beyond a vague
implicit consensus of scholars using it. It is not even a standard in fact,
just a set of conventions that are clearly defined at the centre, but loose
at the periphery: whenever phonemes outside the ambit of classical standard
Sanskrit come into the picture, authors (and/or publishers) seem to choose
transliterations inconsistently on the basis of conventions found in
earlier publications and of whatever diacritical marks they can produce on
their systems. Given that ISO15919 is actively maintained, and is now to be
reconsidered with the involvement of the scholarly user community, this may
be a good time to settle on something that most of us are willing and able
to follow in the future*.*
I personally would certainly be happy to jump on the ISO bandwagon
*provided* that the revised ISO standard will actually be made known to the
public, and not accessible only to those who pay an exorbitant price for
it, get a pirated copy, or rely on incomplete extracts such as that on
Wikipedia. But even then, I think one of the considerations in revising the
standard should be a preference for character combinations that can
actually be displayed properly in more than just a few fonts.
Dan Balogh

On Wed, 7 Jun 2023 at 10:08, Harry Spier via INDOLOGY <
indology at list.indology.info> wrote:

> Thank you for the clarification Madhav.  Since your book predates the
> 15919 standard, I'm wondering what sanskrit  books after creation of the
> 15919 standard have chosen it over the IAST standard.  The two Clay
> Sanskrit library books I have use the  IAST transliteration scheme and as
> far as I can see the Sanskrit etexts in GRETIL also use IAST.  Muktabodha
> uses IAST.
>
> Harry Spier
>
>
> On Tue, Jun 6, 2023 at 8:14 PM Madhav Deshpande <mmdesh at umich.edu> wrote:
>
>> Thanks, Harry, but while writing my संस्कृतसुबोधिनी, which goes back to
>> mid-1980s, I did not consult "ISO 15919 standard" or any such documents.
>> I was following, what seemed to me at the time, to be the prevalent
>> practice. If my memory serves me correctly, to use r̥,  r̥̄, l̥, with small
>> circles under r and l, I was influenced by Wackernagel's Altindische
>> Grammatik. I had used the same in designing my diacritics font
>> Manjushree-CSX. While the ancient fonts used for the संस्कृतसुबोधिनी going
>> back to mid-1980s and the pre-Unicode Manjushree-CSX are no longer usable,
>> I am generally continuing to use these diacritics today. Probably just by
>> acquired habit.
>>
>> Madhav
>>
>> Madhav M. Deshpande
>> Professor Emeritus, Sanskrit and Linguistics
>> University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
>> Senior Fellow, Oxford Center for Hindu Studies
>> Adjunct Professor, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore,
>> India
>>
>> [Residence: Campbell, California, USA]
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Jun 6, 2023 at 4:38 PM Harry Spier via INDOLOGY <
>> indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
>>
>>>  To download a  pdf of the current ISO 15919  standard (a 30 page
>>> document) costs 145 Swiss francs = 160 US dollars. I'm wondering if this is
>>> one of the reasons that most people use IAST for transliterated Sanskrit.
>>> The only place I've seen the ISO 15919 standard used in a book is Madhav
>>> Deshpande's sanskrit primer संस्कृतसुभोधिनी .
>>>
>>> Harry Spier
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> INDOLOGY at list.indology.info
>>> https://list.indology.info/mailman/listinfo/indology
>>>
>>
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