Transliteration of Devanagari in Latin

Sanskrit Transliteration International Alphabet

The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST / MATS, International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration) is the most common Sanskrit transliteration system in the academic environment. IAST is actually the standard for printing works, such as books and magazines, and with the gradual spread of Unicode fonts, it is increasingly being used in electronic submission of texts.

Romanization of the National Library of Calcutta (Kolkata)

The Romanization of the National Library in Kolkata (NLKR, National Library at Kolkata romanization ) is an extension of IAST, designed to transliterate, if possible, all varieties of Indian writing . It differs from IAST in the use of the characters ē and ō for ए and ओ instead of e and o in IAST (in the RNSC e and o are used for short vowels present in many modern languages ​​of India), the use of the 'ḷ' sign for the consonant ಳ in the Kannada language ( in IAST it is a syllable consonant) and the absence of signs for the transmission of ॠ ऌ and ॡ, presented exclusively in Sanskrit.

ISO 15919

The standard transliteration scheme, designed not only for Devanagari, but for all varieties of Indian writing, was adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 2001 under the name "ISO 15919 Standard." This scheme is the basis for all modern digital libraries striving to comply with ISO standards. ISO 15919 is originally based on Unicode and covers a wide range of languages ​​and scripts in South Asia.

The transfer of graphemes available in Devanagari practically coincides with both the IAST academic standard and the system used by the Library of Congress - ALA-LC ^[1] .

Harvard Kyoto

The Harvard-Kyoto system is much simpler than systems using diacritics such as IAST . Instead of letters with diacritics, it uses uppercase letters, so typing in such a system is noticeably easier, but it may be more difficult to read.

ITRANS

The ITRANS circuit is an extension of the Harvard-Kyoto system . It is used on many pages on the web, as well as in electronic correspondence and on forums.

This scheme was developed for the ITRANS software package, which is used to facilitate typing with Indian fonts. The user enters the text in Latin letters using the ITRANS scheme, and the preprocessor automatically converts it to Devanagari (or other Indian script at the user's choice). The latest version of ITRANS was 5.30, released in July 2001.

Welthuis System

One of the drawbacks of the Harvard-Kyoto and ITRANS systems is the use of lowercase and capital letters in different meanings. Frans Veltthuis (Velthuis) tried to avoid this complexity in his system, developed in 1996 for TeX .

In addition to transliterations, practical transcription is used to convey Indian words (for example, names of people and geographical names), which depends on the language of the surrounding text. So the most famous system of practical transcription in English publications is the system of the Royal Geographical Society, or the so-called. RGS-II system. Its main rules are as follows:

• Long and short vowels according to this system are transmitted in the same way as in IAST.
• Nasal vowels are transmitted by a combination of a vowel with n : an , on , en , etc.
• Inhalants are written by combining a consonant with h , just like in other systems: th , dh , kh , etc.
• Cerebral and dental consonants do not differ, for example, t can equally mean both dental [ t ] and cerebral [ ʈ ].
• The sibilants ś and ṣ are transmitted as sh
• Palatal c / ch are transmitted as ch / chh
• Nasal ñ and ṅ are transmitted as ny and ng
• Since this system is used only for the modern languages ​​of India, there are no signs in it for the transfer of specific Sanskrit graphemes.

The following is a comparison of different transliteration systems using the example of Devanagari.

Vowels

Consonants

In Devanagari, as in other varieties of Indian writing , consonant letters by default contain the sound [a]. In all transliteration systems, this sound must be transmitted separately.

Some Consonant Combinations

Other Consonants

Pronunciation of the final “a”

As mentioned above in Devanagari and other Indian scripts, consonant graphemes by default convey not a single consonant, but a syllable with a basic vowel ([a] in Sanskrit and Hindi, [ɔ] in Bengali). In transliteration, this vowel is transmitted separately. Moreover, in many modern languages, in comparison with Sanskrit, at the end of words, this sound was lost, which does not affect the letter. Nevertheless, traditionally in transliteration it was transmitted both in Sanskrit and in modern languages. A more modern system takes into account not only spelling, but also pronunciation, and does not transmit a vowel at the end of words when transliterating texts in modern languages ​​if it is not pronounced there. For example:

• Sanskrit: Mahābhārata ( Mahabharata ), Rāmāyaṇa ( Ramayana ), Śiva ( Shiva )
• Hindi: Mahābhārat, Rāmāyaṇ, Śiv

Nevertheless, in some words, the final “a” is retained to avoid the unpronounceable combinations of consonants at the end of the words. For example: Krishna ( Krishna ), vajra, Maurya ( Maurya ).

Such a falling away of the final “a” is not characteristic of all modern languages, for example, in Kannada it is not, and in Marathi it occurs only under certain conditions.

Initially, when studying Sanskrit in Europe, texts on it were printed in Devanagari font. However, from the very beginning of its existence, European Sanskritology felt the need for standard transmission of Indian writing by means of Latin scripts. In 1816, Franz Bopp, along with the Devanagari, used the Latin script with the designation of long vowels circumflex (â, î, û), and aspirated consonants using the heavy aspirated sign ( dasia ) or an expanded comma (for example, b῾ instead of bh). He transmitted the sybilants ṣ and ś by the combination of “s” with the signs of thick and thin aspiration (psil): (s῾, s᾿). Monier-Williams in his 1899 dictionary used sh and ṡ for the same sounds, respectively.

Towards the end of the 19th century, European scholars began to show less and less interest in using Devanagari as the main means of transmitting Sanskrit and other languages ​​of India. Theodor Aufrecht published the Rig Veda in its entire Latin script, and Devanagari Arthur McDonell also managed without the Devanagari, publishing the Vedic Grammar in 1910 and the Vedic Grammar for Students in 1916.

In 1894, the International Sanskrit Transliteration Alphabet (IAST) was adopted at the International Orientalist Congress in Geneva, with the help of which most Sanskrit texts in the West are now published.

• Indo-Russian practical transcription
• ISCII - 8-bit encoding of Indian scripts

• Transliteration of Indic scripts: how to use ISO 15919 .
• Romanized Latin to Sanskrit - Converts Harvard-Kyoto transliterations into Unicode Devanagari
• HiTrans - Extended ITRANS scheme and real-time Unicode conversion tool
• Quillpad - Intuitive real-time Transliteration for Indian languages
• Google Indic Transliteration - real-time Latin-to-Indic character transliteration
• Girgit Online Indic to Indic Transliteration of Webpages বংলা (Bengali), हिन्दी (Devanagari), ಕನ್ನಡ (Kannada), മലയാളം (Malayalam), ଓଡ଼ିଆ (Oriya), ਗੁਰਮੁਖੀ (Punjabi), தமிழ் (Tamil), తెలుగు (Telugu), ગુજરાતી ( Gujarati), English
• "South Asian text editor" with virtual keyboard providing support for ISO 15919 text input