[INDOLOGY] Anusvara in IAST transliteration

[Dominik Wujastyk]

This is not a matter of truth or logic.  It is merely a matter of
convention, like CSX before it.  IAST certainly defines anusvara as
m+underdot.  Someone must have edited the Wikipedia page.  I've looked
through a few pages of that page's history, and I didn't spot who made the
change, but it doesn't really matter.  I've edited the Wikipedia IAST page
back to normal (ṃ).  Thanks for spotting this, Harry.  When I edited the
page, I added the comment,

"IAST anusvara is dot below.  IAST follows the conventions of written
scholarly communication on South Asian studies as established since ca.
1900.  This differs in small ways from Unicode and the Library of Congress
standards. "


The document headers of files in the SARIT library explain this difference
between IAST and the ISO 15919 encoding.  Note that Unicode names dot-above
only for indigenous Indian writing systems like Devanagari, but it does not
legislate for Indic transliterature into Latin script (so my Wikipedia
comment above was slightly wrong).  As far as I know, it was the Library of
Congress that started promulgating diacritics like under-circle for vocalic
ṛ.    (The LC documentation
<https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization/sanskrit.pdf> for Sanskrit is
the same as IAST except for vocalic r and l).  This usage was then changed
a bit more and codified by the committee members of ISO 15919
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_15919> "romanization of Indic scripts".

I think the main differences are as follow:
— —
IAST ISO 15919
ṃ m-overdot
ṛ r-under circle
ḷ l-under circle
e e-macron
o o-macron

Best,
Dominik

--
Dominik Wujastyk, Professor Emeritus, Classical Indian History
University of Alberta

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