[XeTeX] Hyphenated, transliterated Sanskrit.

BPJ bpj at melroch.se
Mon Nov 22 18:03:43 CET 2010


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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