Dear all,

 

It is my anecdotal impression that IAST/ALA-LC is more used in the U.S. where 
the ISO transliteration standards are not very known, while in Europe, the ISO 
schemes generally happen to be followed, regardless of whether people had 
actually seen the standard or not. I would think that the standard can be found 
in or requested from a university library. You can also reach out to your 
national standardisation body and ask for the ISO standard to be adopted as a 
national standard. Depending on your NB licensing model, this might or might 
not make it more accessible to you.

 

Unfortunately, I have don’t have any leverage on the ISO licensing policies and 
no experts in the committee receive any money from the sales of the standard or 
ISO in general. Traditionally I believe the standardisation model works on the 
premise that an industry following a standard will benefit enough from it to 
not only offset the purchase costs but also invest in developing it. Clearly 
that model does not work for academia. Unicode has expressed an interest in 
having a machine-readable data file for the transliteration standards and I am 
currently exploring how this could be done procedurally and what license would 
that come with, but I cannot promise anything at this point.

 

> 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.

 

You can also look at it the other way round – having a standard define a set of 
characters to use gives you some leverage and go to font vendors or OS vendors 
and say “we need these characters to be supported, this standard mandates their 
usage”.

 

While I am sympathetic to take usability factor into consideration and in 
particular I do support dots below for vocalic r and l, I want to point out 
that there is a lot of bad fonts out there especially for Indic scripts and I 
would be cautious about trying to accommodate to bad practices.

 

Best regards,

Jan

 

From: INDOLOGY <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Satyanad 
Kichenassamy
Sent: Wednesday, June 7, 2023 10:29 AM
To: Harry Spier <[email protected]>; Madhav Deshpande <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [INDOLOGY] Revision of ISO 15919 (transliteration of Indic scripts)

 

 

Dear All,

A quick note: Titus does not use IAST (see the r̥, and the aspirates):

 agním īḷe puróhitaṃ yajñásya devám r̥tvíjam /  



hótāraṃ ratnadʰā́tamam //

agníḥ pū́rvebʰir ŕ̥ṣibʰir ī́ḍyo nū́tanair utá / 



etc.



Here is the source information: "On the basis of the edition by Th. Aufrecht,  
Bonn 1877 (2.Aufl.), entered by H.S. Ananthanarayana, Austin / Texas; 
TITUS version with corrections by Fco.J. Martínez García, synoptically arranged 
with the metrically restored version by B. van Nooten and G. Holland and the 
"Padapātha" version by A. Lubotsky, 
by Jost Gippert, Frankfurt a/M, 



31.1.1997 / 28.2.1998 / 24.6.1998 / 22.10.1999 / 1.6.2000 "



https://titus.fkidg1.uni-frankfurt.de/texte/etcs/ind/aind/ved/rv/mt/rv.htm

I hope this helps,



Regards to all,

            Satyanad Kichenassamy



Le 07/06/2023 à 10:08, Harry Spier via INDOLOGY a écrit :

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 <[email protected] 
<mailto:[email protected]> > 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 
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > 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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Satyanad KICHENASSAMY
Professor of Mathematics
Laboratoire de Mathématiques de Reims  (CNRS, UMR9008)
Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne
F-51687 Reims Cedex 2
France
Web: https://www.normalesup.org/~kichenassamy
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