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

Wed Jun 7 10:53:39 UTC 2023

Dear all,

It is my anecdotal impression that IAST/ALA-LC is more used in the U.S. where the ISO transliteration standards are not very known, while in Europe, the ISO schemes generally happen to be followed, regardless of whether people had actually seen the standard or not. I would think that the standard can be found in or requested from a university library. You can also reach out to your national standardisation body and ask for the ISO standard to be adopted as a national standard. Depending on your NB licensing model, this might or might not make it more accessible to you.

Unfortunately, I have don’t have any leverage on the ISO licensing policies and no experts in the committee receive any money from the sales of the standard or ISO in general. Traditionally I believe the standardisation model works on the premise that an industry following a standard will benefit enough from it to not only offset the purchase costs but also invest in developing it. Clearly that model does not work for academia. Unicode has expressed an interest in having a machine-readable data file for the transliteration standards and I am currently exploring how this could be done procedurally and what license would that come with, but I cannot promise anything at this point.

> 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.

You can also look at it the other way round – having a standard define a set of characters to use gives you some leverage and go to font vendors or OS vendors and say “we need these characters to be supported, this standard mandates their usage”.

While I am sympathetic to take usability factor into consideration and in particular I do support dots below for vocalic r and l, I want to point out that there is a lot of bad fonts out there especially for Indic scripts and I would be cautious about trying to accommodate to bad practices.

Best regards,

Jan

From: INDOLOGY <indology-bounces at list.indology.info> On Behalf Of Satyanad Kichenassamy
Sent: Wednesday, June 7, 2023 10:29 AM
To: Harry Spier <vasishtha.spier at gmail.com>; Madhav Deshpande <mmdesh at umich.edu>
Cc: indology at list.indology.info
Subject: Re: [INDOLOGY] Revision of ISO 15919 (transliteration of Indic scripts)

Dear All,

A quick note: Titus does not use IAST (see the r̥, and the aspirates):

 agním īḷe puróhitaṃ yajñásya devám r̥tvíjam /  

hótāraṃ ratnadʰā́tamam //

agníḥ pū́rvebʰir ŕ̥ṣibʰir ī́ḍyo nū́tanair utá / 

etc.

Here is the source information: "On the basis of the edition by Th. Aufrecht,  Bonn 1877 (2.Aufl.), entered by H.S. Ananthanarayana, Austin / Texas; 
TITUS version with corrections by Fco.J. Martínez García, synoptically arranged with the metrically restored version by B. van Nooten and G. Holland and the "Padapātha" version by A. Lubotsky, 
by Jost Gippert, Frankfurt a/M, 

31.1.1997 / 28.2.1998 / 24.6.1998 / 22.10.1999 / 1.6.2000 "

https://titus.fkidg1.uni-frankfurt.de/texte/etcs/ind/aind/ved/rv/mt/rv.htm

I hope this helps,

Regards to all,

            Satyanad Kichenassamy

Le 07/06/2023 à 10:08, Harry Spier via INDOLOGY a écrit :

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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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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-- 
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Satyanad KICHENASSAMY
Professor of Mathematics
Laboratoire de Mathématiques de Reims  (CNRS, UMR9008)
Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne
F-51687 Reims Cedex 2
France
Web: https://www.normalesup.org/~kichenassamy
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