[INDOLOGY] Revision of ISO 15919 (transliteration of Indic scripts)
Lubomír Ondračka
ondracka at ff.cuni.cz
Thu Jun 8 12:12:28 UTC 2023
I strongly support the requirement to clearly distinguish between
vocalic r̥ and retroflex ṛ.
Low-register manuscripts in Bengali script often follow phonetic
notation rather than precise orthographic rules. So there appears
combinations of characters that are otherwise unthinkable in correct
writing.
For example, you may encounter the word পৃআ [pr̥ā], which at first
glance does not make sense. When you realize that the vocalic r̥ is
pronounced [ri], then it is obvious that the word priyā is meant. If we
transcribe it as pṛā, this information is lost.
Best,
Lubomir
On 07.06.2023 11:28, Dániel Balogh via INDOLOGY wrote:
> 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 <mailto: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
> <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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