[XeTeX] Hyphenated, transliterated Sanskrit.

[Dominik Wujastyk]

Sanskritists have been using ṛ (r-underdot) for over a century.
Promulgating a new standard that changes this usage to r-undercircle is far
from being an obvious choice, in my view.  But we're irrevocably lumbered
with it now.  :-(  Though I note that most Sanskritists pay no attention to
the ISO standard, and continue with IAST, which has been standard in
professional journals and book publications since the nineteenth century.

Of course Hindi flap and Sanskrit vocalic-r have to be distinguished, but
the long-established uniform usage of Sanskritists, present in literally
thousands of publications, should have been given greater weight.

Most Sanskritists view m-overdot (for anusvāra) as obsolete usage, weakly
referential to the Nāgarī orthography, and now strongly deprecated.  Again,
it isn't used in any professional publications, and hasn't been for a
hundred years or more.

Those who write both transliterated Hindi and Sanskrit in the same
publication will be glad of the ISO standard, I suppose.

Typical standard's work: result of a committee that has a certain limited
logic to it, but pays not enough attention to usage amongst professional
groups, and consequently leaves nobody actually happy.

Dominik

On 22 November 2010 18:03, BPJ <bpj at melroch.se> wrote:

> 2010-11-21 10:22, Manuel B. skrev:
>
>  1) I saw that that all diacritics used for IAST appear in the pattern,
>> while some of them (for example ṛ and ṝ) are marked as "non standart
>> transliteration". That is OK, insofar as IAST is not a standart in the
>> official sense. But IAST is most commonly used and the "standart"
>> transliteration of vocalic r in IAST is ṛ, not r̥.
>>
>
> The problem is that since for Hindi and other modern
> Indic languages ṛ is used for the retroflex flap
> -- ḍ with underdot in Nagari -- modeled on the
> Urdu letter for that sound.  In a strict
> transliteration you need a way to distinguish
> between the two, and between ri and r̥.  Since
> Indo-Europeanists have been using r̥ for over a
> century that's obviously the best choice.
>
> /bpj
>
>
>
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