Note that while ISO 15919 indeed mandates ṁ for anusvara, it makes use of ṃ for older Gurmukhi: „Bindi shall be transliterated as ṁ (Hex 1E41) and Tippi as ṃ (Hex 1E43).“
For searching, I would typically transliterate the query into the native script and search in the native script.* That allows me to support several transliteration conventions at the same time (e.g. ū, U, oo for long u). Luckily the conflicts in this direction are rare. Thanks, Jan Kučera ल Institute of South and Central Asia Students, Prague * Usually care also needs to be taken of the special case where if the query ends with a consonant, it is expected to match any syllables with the consonant. From: INDOLOGY <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Harry Spier via INDOLOGY Sent: Monday, March 2, 2026 1:48 PM To: Walter Slaje <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [INDOLOGY] Anusvara in IAST transliteration 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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