Editing Devanagari transliteration (section)

==History of Sanskrit transliteration==
Early Sanskrit texts were originally transmitted by memorisation and repetition. Post-Harappan India had no system for writing Indic languages until the creation (in the 4th-3rd centuries BCE) of the [[Kharoshti]] and [[Brāhmī script|Brahmi]] scripts. These writing systems, though adequate for [[Middle Indic languages]], were not well-adapted to writing Sanskrit.  However, later descendants of Brahmi were modified so that they could record Sanskrit in exacting phonetic detail.  The earliest physical text in Sanskrit is a rock inscription by the [[Western Kshatrapas|Western Kshatrapa]] ruler [[Rudradaman]], written c. 150 CE in [[Junagadh]], [[Gujarat]]. Due to the remarkable proliferation of different varieties of Brahmi in the Middle Ages, there is today no single script used for writing Sanskrit; rather, Sanskrit scholars can write the language in a form of whatever script is used to write their local language. However, since the late Middle Ages, there has been a tendency 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. The ''[[editio princeps]]'' of the [[Rigveda]] by [[Max Müller]] was in Devanagari. Müller's London typesetters competed with their Petersburg peers working on [[Otto Böhtlingk|Böhtlingk]]'s and Roth's dictionary in cutting all the required ligature types.

From its beginnings, Western Sanskrit philology also felt the need for a romanised spelling of the language.{{citation needed|date=August 2015}} [[Franz Bopp]] in 1816 used a romanisation scheme, alongside Devanagari, differing from IAST in expressing vowel length by a circumflex (â, î, û), and aspiration by a ''[[spiritus asper]]'' (e.g. bʽ for IAST bh). The sibilants IAST ṣ and ś he expressed with spiritus asper and lenis, respectively (sʽ, sʼ). [[Monier-Williams]] in his 1899 dictionary used ć, ṡ and sh for IAST c, ś and ṣ, respectively.

From the late 19th century, Western interest in typesetting Devanagari decreased.{{citation needed|date=August 2015}} [[Theodor Aufrecht]] published his 1877 edition of the Rigveda in romanised Sanskrit, and [[Arthur Macdonell]]'s 1910 ''Vedic grammar'' (and 1916 ''Vedic grammar for students'') likewise do without Devanagari (while his introductory ''Sanskrit grammar for students'' retains Devanagari alongside romanised Sanskrit). Contemporary Western editions of Sanskrit texts appear mostly in IAST.