Devanagari transliteration

Template:Short description Template:More citations needed Template:Use dmy dates Template:Use Indian English

Template:Contains special characters Devanagari is an Indic script used for many Indo-Aryan languages of North India and Nepal, including Hindi, Marathi and Nepali, which was the script used to write Classical Sanskrit. There are several somewhat similar methods of transliteration from Devanagari to the Roman script (a process sometimes called romanisation), including the influential and lossless IAST notation.<ref name="ref17yebif">Template:Citation</ref> Romanised Devanagari is also called Romanagari.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

IASTEdit

The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) is a subset of the ISO 15919 standard, used for the transliteration of Sanskrit, Prakrit and Pāḷi into Roman script with diacritics. IAST is a widely used standard. It uses diacritics to disambiguate phonetically similar but not identical Sanskrit glyphs. For example, dental and retroflex consonants are disambiguated with an underdot: dental द=d and retroflex ड=ḍ. An important feature of IAST is that it is losslessly reversible,Template:Citation needed i.e., IAST transliteration may be converted back to correct Devanāgarī or to other South Asian scripts without ambiguity. Many Unicode fonts fully support IAST display and printing.

Hunterian systemEdit

{{#invoke:Labelled list hatnote|labelledList|Main article|Main articles|Main page|Main pages}} The Hunterian system is the "national system of romanisation in India" and the one officially adopted by the Government of India.<ref name="ref04xufam">Template:Citation</ref><ref name="ref48luvep">Template:Citation</ref><ref name="ref65puqac">Template:Citation</ref>

The Hunterian system was developed in the nineteenth century by William Wilson Hunter, then Surveyor General of India.<ref name="ref26vazop">Template:Citation</ref> When it was proposed, it immediately met with opposition from supporters of the earlier practiced non-systematic and often distorting "Sir Roger Dowler method" (an early corruption of Siraj ud-Daulah) of phonetic transcription, which climaxed in a dramatic showdown in an India Council meeting on 28 May 1872 where the new Hunterian method carried the day. The Hunterian method was inherently simpler and extensible to several Indic scripts because it systematised grapheme transliteration, and it came to prevail and gain government and academic acceptance.<ref name="ref26vazop"/> Opponents of the grapheme transliteration model continued to mount unsuccessful attempts at reversing government policy until the turn of the century, with one critic calling appealing to "the Indian Government to give up the whole attempt at scientific (i.e. Hunterian) transliteration, and decide once and for all in favour of a return to the old phonetic spelling."<ref name="ref31xuvad">Template:Citation</ref>

Over time, the Hunterian method extended in reach to cover several Indic scripts, including Burmese and Tibetan.<ref name="ref49pihug">Template:Citation</ref><ref name="ref82hecix">Template:Citation</ref> Provisions for schwa deletion in Indo-Aryan languages were also made where applicable, e.g. the Hindi {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} is transliterated as kānpur (and not kānapura) but the Sanskrit {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} is transliterated as krama (and not kram). The system has undergone some evolution over time. For instance, long vowels were marked with an accent diacritic in the original version, but this was later replaced in the 1954 Government of India update with a macron.<ref name="rotcsa">Template:Citation</ref> Thus, {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} (life) was previously romanised as ján but began to be romanised as jān. The Hunterian system has faced criticism over the years for not producing phonetically accurate results and being "unashamedly geared towards an English-language receiver audience."<ref name="rotcsa"/> Specifically, the lack of differentiation between retroflex and dental consonants (e.g. {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} and {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} are both represented by d) has come in for repeated criticism and inspired several proposed modifications of Hunterian, including using a diacritic below retroflexes (e.g. making {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}=d and {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}=ḍ, which is more readable but requires diacritic printing) or capitalising them (e.g. making {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}=d and {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}=D, which requires no diacritic printing but is less readable because it mixes small and capital letters in words).<ref name="ref06revip">Template:Citation</ref>

Alternative transliteration methodsEdit

Schemes with diacriticsEdit

National Library at Kolkata romanisationEdit

{{#invoke:Labelled list hatnote|labelledList|Main article|Main articles|Main page|Main pages}} The National Library at Kolkata romanisation, intended for the romanisation of all Indic scripts, is an extension of IAST. It differs from IAST in the use of the symbols ē and ō for {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} and {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} (e and o are used for the short vowels present in many Indian languages), the use of 'ḷ' for the consonant (in Kannada) {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, and the absence of symbols for {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} and {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}.

ISO 15919Edit

{{#invoke:Labelled list hatnote|labelledList|Main article|Main articles|Main page|Main pages}} A standard transliteration convention not just for Devanagari,<ref>Devanagari comparison: ISO, ALA-LC, Hunterian in 2005 by Thomas T. Pedersen at Eesti Keele Instituut Transliteration of Non-Roman Scripts</ref> but for all South-Asian languages was codified in the ISO 15919 standard of 2001, providing the basis for modern digital libraries that conform to International Organization for Standardization (ISO) norms. ISO 15919 defines the common Unicode basis 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 all modern operating systems and software packages, as long as they comply with ISO norms. This is a prerequisite for all modern platforms so that ISO 15919 has become the new standard for digital libraries and archives for transliterating all South Asian texts.Template:Original research inline

ISO 15919<ref>Transliteration of Indic scripts: how to use ISO 15919 Template:Webarchive ntlworld.com.</ref> uses diacritics to map the much larger set of Brahmic graphemes to the Latin script. The Devanagari-specific portion is nearly identical to the academic standard, IAST: "International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration", and to ALA-LC, the United States Library of Congress standard.<ref>Hindi romanization LC as pdf by Library of Congress standard, loc.gov.</ref>

Another standard, United Nations Romanization Systems for Geographical Names (UNRSGN), was developed by the United Nations Group of Experts<ref name="Geoname">Template:Citation</ref> on Geographical Names (UNGEGN)<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and covers many Brahmic scripts. There are some differences<ref name="diff">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> between ISO 15919 and UNRSGN.