[INDOLOGY] Anusvara in IAST transliteration

[Paul Hackett]

Dear Harry,

I cannot say that this is a “standard” but it has become common practice in Tibetan scholarship to use ‘m’ with underdot for the anusvara, and ‘m’ with overdot for candrabindu.

Regards,

Paul Hackett


> On Mar 2, 2026, at 8:48 AM, Harry Spier via INDOLOGY <indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
> 
> This Message Is From an External Sender
> This message came from outside your organization.
> Dear everyone,
> Daniel BAlogh wrote:
> I dare say that as far as IAST can be considered a standard, the "correct" IAST anusvāra is ṃ
> Walter Slaje wrote:
>  I believe that whether one uses ṃ or ṁ, there will be no undesirable consequences.
> 
> The reason I asked the question was because of search engines.
> The Searchable Sanskrit Library has a search engine covering multiple collections so all anusvara's (like all other letters in it) need to follow the same convention (either overdot or underdot) .  But it seems that since all the collections I've seen use m underdot thats been chosen as the de facto standard. 
> 
> Thanks,
> Harry Spier
> 
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