Romanization of Sanskrit

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Sanskrit has a number of Romanization schemes, the most widely used today being the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST).

Contents

1 History
2 IAST
3 ASCII schemes

3.1 Harvard-Kyoto
3.2 ITRANS

4 See also

History

Early Sanskrit texts were originally transmitted by memorization 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 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 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, a typographical tour de force at the time. Müller's London typesetters competed with their Petersburg peers working on 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 romanized spelling of the language. Franz Bopp in 1816 used a romanization scheme, alongside Devanagari, differring 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 ṡ and sh for IAST ś and ṣ, respectively.

From the late 19th century, Western interest in typesetting Devanagari decreased. Theodor Aufrecht published his 1877 edition of the Rigveda in romanized 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 romanized Sanskrit). Contemporary Western editions of Sanskrit texts appear mostly in IAST.

IAST

The IAST standard was established by the Congress of Orientalists at Athens in 1912. The Sanskrit phonemes in their traditional order are transcribed as follows:

a ā i ī u ū ṛ  ṝ  ḷ  ḹ
e ai o au
ṃ ḥ
k kh g gh ṅ
c ch j jh ñ
ṭ ṭh ḍ ḍh ṇ
t th d dh n
p ph b bh m
y r l v
ś ṣ s h

ASCII schemes

In the late 20th century, typesetting Sanskrit on computers became an issue. Lacking diacritics led to the innovation of ASCII only romanization schemes. With the wide availability of Unicode aware web browsers in the 2000s, most online publications switched to IAST, but ASCII only schemes remain popular in email correspondence because of their ease of entry. The disadvantage of ASCII schemes is case-sensitivity, implying that transliterated names may not be capitalized.

Harvard-Kyoto

a A i I u U R RR lR lRR
e ai o au
M H
k kh g gh G
c ch j jh J
T Th D Dh N
t th d dh n
p ph b bh m
y r l v
z S s h

ITRANS

ITRANS has the scope of ASCII transliteration of all Indic scripts, and thus Sanskrit only uses a subset of ITRANS signs.