It makes sense to absorb 'a', if the language does not have many conjuncts. There is a lot of saving in typing. We write कमल using only three strokes 'kml' instead of 'kamala'.

But for a language like Sanskrit which has so many conjuncts, it hardly makes any difference. While you are saving on 'अ', you are paying with '्'s.  I did a small experiment with Bhagvadgeeta. I encoded it with these two different schemes. The one with 'अ' had only 5% extra characters than the one with '्'.

-- Amba Kulkarni




On 13 November 2013 20:50, Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm slightly appalled by what I'm hearing about typing "f" in between every conjuncted letter.  That must make typing a terrible pain! 

All our modern operating systems have built-in stuff for making conjuncts automatically by just typing the letters one after another (as in romanization).*  I don't understand why MS Win and OS/X users are doing this other, laborious thing.  Am I missing something obvious?

When I type Devanagari, I type kRSNa and get कृष्ण, kArtsnyam for कार्त्स्न्यम् . It's the same whatever program I'm using,  because the keyboard/language stuff is handled by the operating system, not each individual program.  As far as I know, anyhow.  It's handled by software on my system, Ubuntu Linux, called Ibus and m17n (which comes with Devanagari and IAST romanization already pre-defined).

Dominik


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