[XeTeX] Polyglossia and Sanskrit

[François Patte]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Le 05.10.2008 10:29, Daniel Stender a écrit :
> Yves Codet wrote:
> 
>> I wonder if this behaviour of Polyglossia should not be changed. 
>> Actually Sanskrit has no proper script, or it has many. If
>> Devanagari is often preferred nowadays if does not mean that it is
>> *the* Sanskrit script. I would be interested to know what members
>> of the list think.
> 
> I think principally that's right. I don't know what is the case with
> other scripts than Devanagari, but it could be argued that there are
> even differences in hyphentation between Devanagari and
> transliteration (that means romanized Sanskrit), while Devanagari
> hyphens Akshara-wise that could be handled more freely in
> Romanization: "satyam eva jayate" is possible instead of "satyameva
> jayate" which results in "sa-tyam e-va ja-ya-te" instead of
> "sa-tya-me-va ja-ya-te"
> 
> Furthermore I think a separated hyphenation pattern for romanization
> is needed, for example nobody hyphens "ga-ccha-ti" but "gac-cha-ti",
> isn't it?

This problem has been argued a long time ago (Indology, Wujastik and co).

Practice of Sanskrit manuscripts shows that there is absolutely no
pattern to hyphenate a text in Indian scripts, the scribe writes his
text continuously and goes to the following line anywhere inside a word.
So the akshara model seems to be a good (and I think easy) solution. But
I am wondering if the same file can be use to automatically hyphenate a
Sanskrit text whatever the script. I you have a text in grantha script,
as there are less ligatures in this script than in denanagari, can we
use the same hyphen-file with xe(la)tex?

Moreover, for grantha, there is not yet an unicode scheme for this
script and the only fonts I found uses the unicode Bengali scheme!


For translitteration in roman script, I believe that there is an
influence of the habits of the typographical rules used by the person
who translitterates a text; for instance I am wondering if "ga-ccha-ti"
is not possible for English people, who could write "go-ing", while
French, and maybe others, will write "gac-cha-ti"?

- --
François Patte
UFR de mathématiques et informatique
Université Paris Descartes
45, rue des Saints Pères
F-75270 Paris Cedex 06
Tél. +33 (0)1 44 55 35 61
http://www.math-info.univ-paris5.fr/~patte
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFI6J0UdE6C2dhV2JURAnOFAJ0Tyi03OKiTb0a0q2yZ3VCrNVFZCgCeOqFZ
PAjvlW6pxgW5WjuKHl+aSQ0=
=nksJ
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----