[XeTeX] Hyphenated, transliterated Sanskrit.

[Dominik Wujastyk]

 On 21 November 2010 10:12, Yves Codet <yves.codet at sfr.fr> wrote:

> Debatable, I'm not sure :) Gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum.
> Personally I don't mind breaks such as a-rhasi. I know many prefer ar-hasi,
> but there are some books where you would find a-rhasi. On page 189 of Gray's
> edition of Vāsavadattā (Delhi, 1962), for instance, I can see:
> ...nirmu-kta..., ...ku-ṭṭimam.
>
> So, for a start, I did exactly what Arthur described, I chose the easy way.
> But I can add rules allowing a break after the first consonant of a
> consonant cluster. If there are rules such as:
> a1
> ...
> r3h
> you should get ar-hasi rather than a-rhasi without having to modify
> hyphenmins.
>
>
I cannot think of cases where a line-final single-letter hyphenation like
a-rhasi would look good.  Even examples with alpha-privative, like a-bheda,
- which are at least etymologically justified - don't look good.

The trouble here is that of good precedent.  We need some roman-script
Sanskrit with lots of hyphens that has been typeset by knowledgeable
typesetters and looks beautiful.  I don't think that exists, or at least,
it's not known to me.  The biggest romanised corpus I can think of
immediately is the Pali Text Society volumes, but of course that's Pali not
Sanskrit.  And I don't know how good the hyphenation is.

I would expect the Clay Sanskrit Library to have good hyphenation; again
it's hard to tell, and I don't have all vols. to hand.  But in
Dezs\H{o}'s *Much
Ado About Religion* has a pṛ-cchāmaḥ (p.110) which is pretty ugly, I think,
though not impossibly so.  The cardinal sin of hyphenating a digraph
aspirated consonant is avoided (budd-ha), as far as I can see.  I don't have
the prose *Daśakumāracarita* which, being prose, should offer more
hyphenation cases than verse works.

I think we're breaking new ground here, and I think it may take a while for
a nice set of hyphenation patterns to settle down.  The guidelines surely
must include consideration of:

   1. etymology - word breaks within compounds (sārva-bhaumas)
   2. etymology - prefix, suffix, infix breaks within words (bhav-a-ti
   bud-dha adhi-kṛtam)
   3. euphony - lines shouldn't begin with non-existent initials like rh or
   mh- (a-rhasi).  (Okay, since Pingree's CESS A4, we know there's an author
   Mhālugi, but how many other words begin with mh-?)

Dominik
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