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

[Andrew Ollett]

Dear all,

I would recommend that all of us, in our discussions about transliteration
and standards, bear a few things in mind.

1. It is 2023. If you are typing on a computer, any transliteration system
you use is going to be interconvertible with any other. (With some
exceptions: see below.) I assume most Indologists still don't know this,
but going from ISO-15919 to IAST and back is a totally trivial process, and
there are many tools available to do so (including Aksharamukha
<https://aksharamukha.appspot.com/>, and the Sanscript
<https://github.com/indic-transliteration> libraries for python,
javascript, etc.). If you are happy with typing in IAST, or HK, or SLP1,
nobody will take that away from you.

2. There is a totally separate question of what transliteration system is
to be employed in publications. Web-based publications in principle allow
for Indic-language text to be displayed in any arbitrary system. On my Sanskrit
course <http://prakrit.info/vrddhi/course/> people can choose between
viewing the text in ISO-15919 and Devanagari. But most publications are
still based on a "paper-like" model, where the final result is fixed, and
therefore a choice needs to be made. The primary reasoning behind this
choice is *inertia*, i.e., whatever system of transliteration the author or
publisher has used in the past. This is not necessarily a bad reason!

3. There is one very simple reason to prefer ISO-15919. If you are working
with languages other than Sanskrit, you simply cannot use IAST without
ambiguity. Is ṛ a flap or a vowel? Is ḷ a retroflex lateral or a vowel? For
distinctions that are not made in Sanskrit, one has to add new signs
anyway, such as ṟ, ḻ, ṉ, ə, and so on. And the vowels present particular
difficulties. Either you retain "e" and "o" as long vowels, and mark the
short versions with "ĕ" and "ŏ," or you adopt a consist system of
representing vowel length (no macron means short, macron means long, or
something like that) which contravenes IAST. Since IAST is not a standard,
any additions or modifications are *per se* arbitrary, and for that reason
I have seen a number of very different solutions for, e.g., solving the
vowel length issue while retaining some version of the IAST system. For
these reasons, I have been persuaded a long time ago that ISO-15919 is to
be preferred for representing Indic languages in transliteration,
especially if one's research includes languages other than Sanskrit.

4. To ask ISO-15919 to include ṛ and ṃ as "permitted variants" would be a
violation of the principle of non-ambiguity, since those graphemes are
already reserved for transcribing "ड़" and "ੰ" (0A70, Gurmukhi tippi). If
you want to use those signs in their traditional IAST values, use IAST.

5. To reiterate what Jan has already said, it is one thing to define a
standard, and another to implement it. Font support for ISO-15919 is not as
robust for IAST, in part because IAST makes use of a smaller range of
diacritics and combinations. But I have added the relevant diacritic
combinations to the fonts that I use, and a wider uptake of ISO-15919 would
probably lead to wider font support.

Andrew

On Sun, Jun 11, 2023 at 8:41 AM Dominik Wujastyk via INDOLOGY <
indology at list.indology.info> wrote:

> Perhaps the way forward is in Dániel's phrase "permitted optional variant
> of ISO15919".  If we had a few more permitted variants in ISO15919, maybe
> we could all get on with our real work.
>
> I may be wrong, but my earliest memory of the institutional promotion of
> the under-*circle* for ऋ etc. in romanized Sanskrit was from the Library
> of Congress in the context of 8-bit MARC cataloguing.  See here
> <https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization/sanskrit.pdf> for Sanskrit,
> and ALA-LC romanization <https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman.html>
> generally.
>
> I don't think under-circle is specifically "European" in any measurable
> sense.  As far as I know, underdot for anusvāra and vowels, i.e., IAST, has
> been the most widespread convention at least since the nineteenth century.
> See, e.g., the World Congress of Orientalists (Berlin 1881, Geneva, 1894)
> that MW referred to in his introduction (1899: xxix-xxx). See also.,
>
> Plunckett, G. T. (1895) “Tenth International Congress of Orientalists Held
> at Geneva: Report of the Transliteration Committee,” Journal of the Royal
> Asiatic Society 879–892. Available at:
> https://bahai-library.com/plunkett_transliteration_congress_orientalists.
>
> Monier-Williams referred several times, in 1899, to what we today call
> IAST as being "German".
>
> I don't actually know who formalized IAST, but it does an excellent job of
> recording what most indologists, publishers and journals actually do, in my
> view.  Yes, it could do with cleaning up around the edges and a bit of
> extension perhaps (remember CS, CSX, CSX+).  But so can all the other
> standards, formal or informal.  As a workaday description of what almost
> everyone does in practice, it's valuable.  I wish it were a formal
> standard, or had been used by the authors of ISO15919; I think they were
> listening to the library community, not research scholars and professors.
>
> As for ISO standards becoming freely available, I doubt that that will
> happen any time soon.  This is a scandalous situation, and it applies also
> to national standards.  We taxpayers pay committees to work stuff out for
> us, and then we have to buy the results at exorbitant prices.  Better
> people than me have fought this battle and lost.
>
> Best,
> Dominik
>
>
>
>
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