Devanagari Transliteration - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia

Devanagari transliterationFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There are several methods of transliteration from Devangar to the Roman script, and also oftranscription (Romanization).[1]

Contents1 IAST2 Hunterian system3 Alternative transliteration methods

3.1 Schemes with diacritics3.1.1 National Library at Kolkata romanization3.1.2 ISO 15919

3.2 ASCII schemes3.2.1 Harvard-Kyoto3.2.2 ITRANS scheme3.2.3 Velthuis3.2.4 SLP13.2.5 Others

4 Transliteration Comparison4.1 Vowels4.2 Consonants4.3 Irregular Consonant Clusters4.4 Other Consonants

5 Details5.1 Treatment of inherent schwa5.2 Retroflex consonants5.3 Aspirated consonants

6 History of Sanskrit Transliteration7 See also8 References9 External links

IASTMain article: International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration

The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) is a subset of the ISO 15919 standard,used for the transliteration of Sanskrit and Pi into Roman script with diacritics. IAST is a widely usedstandard.

Devanagari transliteration - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari_transliteration

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Hunterian systemMain article: Hunterian transliteration

The Hunterian system is the "national system of romanization in India" and the one officially adopted bythe Government of India.[2][3][4]

The Hunterian system was developed in the nineteenth century by William Wilson Hunter, thenSurveyor General of India.[5] When it was proposed, it immediately met with opposition from supportersof the earlier practiced non-systematic and often distorting "Sir Roger Dowler method" (an earlycorruption of Siraj ud-Daulah) of phonetic transcription, which climaxed in a dramatic showdown in anIndia Council meeting on 28 May 1872 where the new Hunterian method carried the day. The Hunterianmethod was inherently simpler and extensible to several Indic scripts because it systematized graphemetransliteration, and it came to prevail and gain government and academic acceptance.[5] Opponents ofthe grapheme transliteration model continued to mount unsuccessful attempts at reversing governmentpolicy until the turn of the century, with one critic calling appealing to "the Indian Government to giveup the whole attempt at scientific (i.e. Hunterian) transliteration, and decide once and for all in favour ofa return to the old phonetic spelling."[6]

Over time, the Hunterian method extended in reach to cover several Indic scripts, including Burmeseand Tibetan.[7][8] Provisions for schwa deletion in Indo-Aryan languages were also made whereapplicable, e.g. the Hindi % is transliterated as knpur (and not knapura) but the Sanskrit ' istransliterated as krama (and not kram). The system has undergone some evolution over time. Forinstance, long vowels were marked with an accent diacritic in the original version, but this was laterreplaced in the 1954 Government of India update with a macron.[9] Thus, (life) was previouslyromanized as jn but began to be romanized as jn. The Hunterian system has faced criticism over theyears for not producing phonetically accurate results and being "unashamedly geared towards anEnglish-language receiver audience."[9] Specifically, the lack of differentiation between retroflex anddental consonants (e.g. and are both represented by d) has come in for repeated criticism andinspired several proposed modifications of Hunterian, including using a diacritic below retroflexes (e.g.making =d and =, which is more readable but requires diacritic printing) or capitalizing them (e.g.making =d and =D, which requires no diacritic printing but is less readable because it mixes smalland capital letters in words).[10]

Alternative transliteration methodsSchemes with diacritics

National Library at Kolkata romanization

Main article: National Library at Kolkata romanization

The National Library at Kolkata romanization, intended for the romanization of all Indic scripts, is anextension of IAST. It differs from IAST in the use of the symbols and for and (e and o are used


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for the short vowels present in many Indian languages), the use of '' for the consonant (in Kannada) ,and the absence of symbols for and .

ISO 15919

Main article: ISO 15919

A standard transliteration convention not just for Devanagari, but for all South-Asian languages wascodified in the ISO 15919 standard of 2001, providing the basis for modern digital libraries that conformto International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) norms. ISO 15919 defines the common Unicodebasis for Roman transliteration of South-Asian texts in a wide variety of languages/scripts.

ISO 15919 transliterations are platform-independent texts, so that they can be used identically on allmodern operating systems and software packages, as long as they comply with ISO norms. This is aprerequisite for all modern platforms, so that ISO 15919 has become the new standard for digitallibraries and archives for transliterating all South Asian texts.

ISO 15919 uses diacritics to map the much larger set of Brahmic graphemes to the Latin script. See alsoTransliteration of Indic scripts: how to use ISO 15919 (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/stone-catend/trind.htm). The Devanagari-specific portion is nearly identical to the academic standard, IAST:"International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration", and to the United States Library of Congressstandard, ALA-LC: [1] (http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization/hindi.pdf)

ASCII schemes

Harvard-Kyoto

Main articles: Harvard-Kyoto and ITRANS

Compared to IAST, Harvard-Kyoto looks much simpler. It does not contain any of the diacritic marksthat IAST contains. Instead of diacritics, Harvard-Kyoto uses capital letters. The use of capital lettersmakes typing in Harvard-Kyoto much easier than in IAST but produces words with capital letters insidethem.

ITRANS scheme

Main article: ITRANS

ITRANS is an extension of Harvard-Kyoto. Many webpages are written in ITRANS. Many forums arealso written in ITRANS.

The ITRANS transliteration scheme was developed for the ITRANS software package, a pre-processorfor Indic scripts. The user inputs in Roman letters and the ITRANS preprocessor converts the Romanletters into Devangar (or other Indic scripts). The latest version of ITRANS is version 5.30 released inJuly, 2001.


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Velthuis

The disadvantage of the above ASCII schemes is case-sensitivity, implying that transliterated namesmay not be capitalized. This difficulty is avoided with the system developed in 1996 by Frans Velthuisfor TeX, loosely based on IAST, in which case is irrelevant.

SLP1

SLP1 (Sanskrit Library Phonetic) is a case-sensitive scheme initially used by Sanskrit Library(http://sanskritlibrary.org/tomcat/sl/ScriptTable) which was developed by Peter Scharf and (the late)Malcolm Hyman, who first described it in their book (http://sanskrit1.ccv.brown.edu/tomcat/sl/-/pub/lies_sl.pdf) (Appendix B). The advantage is that a single ASCII character is used for each Devanagariletter, which eases reverse transliteration.[11]

Others

Other less popular ASCII schemes include wx-encoding, Vedatype and the 7-bit ISO 15919.WX-encoding, also called Hyderabad-Tirupati scheme, was used for internal representation by acomputer, as described in NLP Panini (http://ltrc.iiit.ac.in/downloads/nlpbook/nlp-panini.pdf) (AppendixB). It is similar to, but not as versatile as, SLP1, as far as coverage of Sanskrit is concerned. Comparisonof WX with other schemes is found in Huet (2009), App A. (http://yquem.inria.fr/~huet/PUBLIC/Brown.pdf). Vedatype is another scheme used for encoding Vedic texts at Maharishi University ofManagement. An online transcoding utility across all these schemes is provided at the Sanskrit Library(http://sanskritlibrary.org/tomcat/sl/TranscodeText). ISO 15919 includes a so-called "limited characterset" option to replace the diacritics by prefixes, so that it is ASCII-compatible. A pictorial explanation ishere (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/stone-catend/tri7-cnv.gif) from Anthony Stone(http://homepage.ntlworld.com/stone-catend/trioprc.htm).

Transliteration ComparisonThe following is a comparison of the major transliteration methods used for Devangar.

Vowels


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Devangar IAST Harvard-Kyoto ITRANS Velthuis SLP1 a a a a a A A/aa aa A i i i i i I I/ii ii I u u u u u U U/uu uu U e e e e e ai ai ai ai E o o o o o au au au au O

R RRi/Rî .r f RR RRI/RÎ .rr F lR LLi/Lî .l x lRR LLI/LÎ .ll X

: M M/.n/.m .m M H H .h H< .N ~

ConsonantsThe Devangar consonant letters include an implicit 'a' sound. In all of the transliteration systems, that'a' sound must be represented explicitly.


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Devangar IAST Harvard-Kyoto ITRANS Velthuis SLP1 ka ka ka ka ka kha kha kha kha Ka ga ga ga ga ga gha gha gha gha Ga a Ga ~Na "na Na ca ca cha ca ca cha cha Cha cha Ca ja ja ja ja ja jha jha jha jha Ja a Ja ~na ~na Ya a Ta Ta .ta wa ha Tha Tha .tha Wa a Da Da .da qa ha Dha Dha .dha Qa a Na Na .na Ra ta ta ta ta ta tha tha tha tha Ta da da da da da dha dha dha dha Da na na na na na pa pa pa pa pa pha pha pha pha Pa ba ba ba ba ba bha bha bha bha Ba


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ma ma ma ma ma ya ya ya ya ya ra ra ra ra ra la la la la la va va va/wa va va a za sha "sa Sa a Sa Sha .sa za sa sa sa sa sa ha ha ha ha ha

Irregular Consonant Clusters

Devangar ISO 15919 Harvard-Kyoto ITRANS Velthuis SLP1V ka kSa kSa/kSha/xa k.sa kzaW tra tra tra tra traX ja jJa GYa/j~na j~na jYaY ra zra shra "sra Sra

Other Consonants

Devangar ISO 15919 ITRANS qa qa kha Kha a Ga za za fa fa a .Da/Ra ha .Dha/Rha


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DetailsTreatment of inherent schwaDevangar consonants include an "inherent a" sound, called the schwa, that must be explicitlyrepresented with an "a" character in the transliteration. Many words and names transliterated fromDevangar end with "a", to indicate the pronunciation in the original Sanskrit. This schwa isobligatorily deleted in several modern Indo-Aryan languages, including Hindustani. This results indiffering transliterations for Sanskrit and schwa-deleting languages that retain or eliminate the schwa asappropriate:

Sanskrit: Mahbhrata, Rmyaa, iva, SmavedaHindi: Mahbhrat, Rmya, iv, Smved

Some words may keep the final a, generally because they would be difficult to say without it:

Krishna, Vajra, Maurya

Retroflex consonantsMost Indian languages make a distinction between the retroflex and dental forms of the dentalconsonants. In formal transliteration schemes, the standard Roman letters are used to indicate the dentalform, and the retroflex form is indicated by special marks, or the use of other letters. E.g., in IASTtransliteration, the retroflex forms are , , and .

In most informal transcriptions the distinction between retroflex and dental consonants is not indicated.

Aspirated consonantsWhere the letter "h" appears after a plosive consonant in Devangar transliteration, it always indicatesaspiration. Thus "ph" is pronounced as the p in "pit" (with a small puff of air released as it is said), neveras the ph in "photo" (IPA /f/). (On the other hand, "p" is pronounced as the p in "spit" with no release ofair.) Similarly "th" is an aspirated "t", neither the th of "this" (voiced, IPA //) nor the th of "thin"(unvoiced, IPA //).

The aspiration is generally indicated in both formal and informal transliteration systems.

History of Sanskrit TransliterationEarly Sanskrit texts were originally transmitted by memorization and repetition. Post-Harappan Indiahad no system for writing Indic languages until the creation (in the 4th-3rd centuries BCE) of theKharoshti and Brahmi scripts. These writing systems, though adequate for Middle Indic languages, werenot well-adapted to writing Sanskrit. However, later descendants of Brahmi were modified so that theycould record Sanskrit in exacting phonetic detail. The earliest physical text in Sanskrit is a rockinscription by the Western Kshatrapa ruler Rudradaman, written c. 150 CE in Junagadh, Gujarat. Due tothe remarkable proliferation of different varieties of Brahmi in the Middle Ages, there is today no single


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script used for writing Sanskrit; rather, Sanskrit scholars can write the language in a form of whateverscript is used to write their local language. However, since the late Middle Ages, there has been atendency to use Devanagari for writing Sanskrit texts for a widespread readership.

Western scholars in the 19th century adopted Devanagari for printed editions of Sanskrit texts. Theeditio princeps of the Rigveda by Max Mller was in Devanagari, a typographical tour de force at thetime. Mller's London typesetters competed with their Petersburg peers working on Bhtlingk's andRoth's dictionary in cutting all the required ligature types.

From its beginnings, Western Sanskrit philology also felt the need for a romanized spelling of thelanguage. Franz Bopp in 1816 used a romanization scheme, alongside Devanagari, differing from IASTin expressing vowel length by a circumflex (, , ), and aspiration by a spiritus asper (e.g. b for IASTbh). The sibilants IAST and he expressed with spiritus asper and lenis, respectively (s, s). Monier-Williams in his 1899 dictionary used and sh for IAST and , respectively.

From the late 19th century, Western interest in typesetting Devanagari decreased. Theodor Aufrechtpublished his 1877 edition of the Rigveda in romanized Sanskrit, and Arthur Macdonell's 1910 Vedicgrammar (and 1916 Vedic grammar for students) likewise do without Devanagari (while hisintroductory Sanskrit grammar for students retains Devanagari alongside romanized Sanskrit).Contemporary Western editions of Sanskrit texts appear mostly in IAST.

See alsoThe National Library at Kolkata romanization and ISO 15919 are extensions of IAST to transcribeall Indic scriptsISCII, an 8-bit encoding for Indic scriptsITRANS, a transliteration scheme used in Phonetic Devanagari typing toolsHunterian system, the government-approved standard for transliterating Standard Hindi in IndiaDominik Wujastyk, "Transliteration of Devangar" (1996) (http://indology.info/email/members/wujastyk/). (figure 6: transliteration table (http://indology.info/email/members/wujastyk/translit.pdf)). PDF (http://indology.info/email/members/wujastyk/translit.pdf).Transliteration Pages by Tony Stone (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/stone-catend/translit.htm).This website presents and discusses ISO 15919 Transliteration of Devanagari and related Indicscripts into Latin characters. ISO 15919, researched and authored by Dr Stone, with consultationwithin the community of indologists, is the International Standard governing Indic transliteration.These pages include tables giving equivalences of Indic characters with Unicode characters.

References^ Daya Nand Sharma, Transliteration into Romanand Devangar of the languages of the Indiangroup (http://books.google.com/books?id=HWJJAAAAYAAJ), Survey of India,1972, "... With the passage of time there hasemerged a practically uniform system oftransliteration of Devanagari and alliedalphabets. Nevertheless, no single system of

1. Romanization has yet developed ..."


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^ United Nations Group of Experts onGeographical Names, United Nations Departmentof Economic and Social Affairs, Technicalreference manual for the standardization ofgeographical names (http://books.google.com/books?id=mh8u32ANQxAC), United NationsPublications, 2007, ISBN 978-92-1-161500-5, "...ISO 15919 ... There is no evidence of the use ofthe system either in India or in internationalcartographic products ... The Hunterian system isthe actually used national system of romanizationin India ..."

2.

^ United Nations Department of Economic andSocial Affairs, United Nations RegionalCartographic Conference for Asia and the FarEast, Volume 2 (http://books.google.com/books?id=QKsvAAAAYAAJ), United Nations,1955, "... In India the Hunterian system is used,whereby every sound in the local language isuniformly represented by a certain letter in theRoman alphabet ..."

3.

^ National Library (India), Indian scientific &technical publications, exhibition 1960: abibliography (http://books.google.com/books?id=8VYEAQAAIAAJ), Council ofScientific & Industrial Research, Government ofIndia, 1960, "... The Hunterian system oftransliteration, which has internationalacceptance, has been used ..."

4.

^ a b Francis Henry Skrine, Sir William WilsonHunter, Life of Sir William Wilson Hunter,K.C.S.I., M.A., LL.D., a vice-president of theRoyal Asiatic society, etc(http://books.google.com/books?id=a1O21Ciyid0C), Longmans, Green,and co., 1901, "... phonetic or 'Sir Roger Dowlermethod' ... The Secretary of State and the greatmajority of his councillors gave an unqualifiedsupport to the Hunterian system ..."

5.

^ The Fortnightly, Volume 68(http://books.google.com/books?id=NwoeAQAAIAAJ), Chapman andHall, 1897, "... the Indian Government to give upthe whole attempt at scientific (i.e. Hunterian)transliteration, and decide once and for all infavour of a return to the old phonetic spelling ..."

6.

^ Mnn Latt Ykhun, Modernization of Burmese(http://books.google.com/books?id=Iy5kAAAAMAAJ), Oriental Institutein Academia, Publishing House of theCzechoslovak Academy of Sciences, 1966, "...There does exist a system df transcribingBurmese words in roman letters, one that iscalled the 'Government', or the 'Hunterian'method ..."

7.

^ Kunwar Krishan Rampal, Mapping andcompilation (http://books.google.com/books?id=aurHGtGvKGIC), Concept PublishingCompany, 1993, ISBN 978-81-7022-414-3, "...The Hunterian system has rules fortransliteration into English the names formHindi, Urdu, Arabic, Burmese, Chinese andTibetan origin. These rules are described inChapter VI, Survey of India, Handbook ofTopographical Mapping ..."

8.

^ a b The Romanization of Toponyms in theCountries of South Asia (http://www.eki.ee/wgrs/wgr06_5.htm), retrieved 2011-02-27, "... Inthe late 19th century sources, the system markslong vowels with an acute accent, and renders theletters k and q both as k. However, when thesystem was again published in 1954, alterationshad been made. Long vowels were now markedwith a macron4 and the q-k distinction wasmaintained ..."

9.

^ Institution of Surveyors (India), Indiansurveyor, Volumes 33-34(http://books.google.com/books?id=2_BVAAAAMAAJ), Institution ofSurveyors., 1991, "... Suggested by . Mr. GSOberoi, Director, Survey of India, in lieu of theexisting table 'Hunterian System ofTransliteration' which does not distinguishbetween and , and , and ..."

10.

^ http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/monier/help.html

11.

External linksTransliteration tool (http://www.ashtangayoga.info/philosophy/transkription-tool/) - Web basedtransliteration tool for Devanagari, Velthuis, Harvard-Kyoto, ITRANS, Simplifiedhttp://www.cdacmumbai.in/xlit/editor for English to Indian Language TransliterationUnicode Indic Editor (http://hacksterous.wordpress.com/unicode-indic-editor/) A Tcl/Tk-based


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portable WYSIWYG transliteration editor that supports Harvard-Kyoto and other transliterationschemes. UIE is Free Software (GNU GPL version 3).Romanized Latin to Sanskrit - English to sanskrit converter unicode (http://vikku.info/indian-language-unicode-converter/sanskrit-unicode-converter.html) - Converts Harvard-Kyototransliterations into Unicode DevanagariInternational Components for Unicode (http://site.icu-project.org/) - Java/C API to transliterateUnicode text from many languages to Devanagari, supports 8 languagesHiTrans (http://www.giitaayan.com/x.htm) - Extended ITRANS scheme and real-time Unicodeconversion toolQuillpad (http://quillpad.in/) - Intuitive real-time Transliteration for Indian languagesGoogle Indic Transliteration (http://www.google.com/transliterate/indic/) - real-time Latin-to-Indic character transliterationModern Transcription of Sanskrit (http://shashir.autodidactus.org/shashir_umich/sanskrit_transcription.html) - download-able specifications for IAST and notes on transcribingDevanagari.Girgit Online Indic to Indic Transliteration of Webpages (http://girgit.chitthajagat.in/) (Bengali), ab (Devanagari), $ (Kannada), (Malayalam), " (Oriya), ""(Punjabi), (Tamil), !"# (Telugu), " (Gujarati), EnglishIndinator Indic language transliterator (http://indinator.com/) Free online tool for, a downloadversion is available as well."South Asian text editor" with virtual keyboard providing support for ISO 15919 text input(http://www.e-ternals.com/vamana/)Lipikaar (http://www.lipikaar.com/) - Comprehensive Devanagari typing tool, easy for typingwords with halant and nuktas.Indian Languages Transliteration (http://vikku.info/indian-language-unicode-converter/index.html)Phonetic Translation Library (http://phtranslator.sourceforge.net/) C/C++ API for transliteratingIndian Language content. Supported Languages: Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam,Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, TeluguDevangar to ISO 15919 (IAST) converter (http://www.puredaft.com/examples/iast/) Online toolfor converting Devanagari to IASTSimple Devanagari - Latin Transliteration, useful as filename (http://www.hindidevanagari.com/transliteration/xnagari_scheme.html)WERD (http://werd.sourceforge.net/) - Write English Read Devanagari, the free and opensourceIndic transliteration toolCDAC Transliteration (http://transliteration.cdac.in) - Indic Transliteration Demo

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