CZ:Romanization/Sanskrit

The is a draft recommendation on how to romanize Sanskrit words and names within Citizendium. It is not official Citizendium policy. You may edit this as you would any other page within this site. Discussion of the issues should take place on the Talk page.

Romanization preferred to Anglicanization

In the early days of the Orientalist tradition, some English-language authors attempted to render Sanskrit and other Indian languages into Roman script without the use of diacritics. This practice is almost extinct: it is never used in academic works, but it is occasionally encountered in journalism and other popular writing. It has no place, however, in an encyclopedia.

An encyclopedia has compelling reasons for using a clear system of romanization. The novice student of Sanskrit will encounter a great deal of new terminology. However, if an imprecise system of romanization is used, the reader will not be able to distinguish the ś in Sanskrit from the ṣ. For clarity, Citizendium contributors should use romanized versions of Sanskrit terminology.

Harvard-Kyoto and ITRANS

Harvard-Kyoto and ITRANS are two forms of Romanization of Sanskrit. They were developed in the early days of the internet, and transliterate devanagari writings into ASCII-only Roman script. The standard academic transliteration has remained IAST, however, and the internet is now much more diacritic-friendly. Citizendium contributors should not use Harvard-Kyoto and ITRANS romanization.

IAST v. ISO 15919

The two standards for Romanizing devanagari script are the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST), set out in 1912, and ISO 15919. For the purposes of romanizing Sanskrit, they are basically the same. If there is some compelling reason that we should officially endorse ISO 15919 over IAST, then it may be prudent to do so.

Sandhi

A special note is in order about sandhi in Sanskrit transliteration. Sandhi is the combination of sounds in speech, which happens in almost every language. Most languages do not usually reflect these processes in their writing system; Sanskrit, due to the early linguistic advances of its grammarians, does. The student of Sanskrit will take a certain amount of time to adjust to the application of sandhi, but it is not a skill we should require of our readers.

Unless Citizendium contributors are quoting at length from Sanskrit writings, Sanskrit should not be written with external sandhi (sandhi operating across word boundaries). Sanskrit words should be given before the operation of sandhi, and without inflectional endings (as they are found in the dictionary).

Words should usually be given with internal sandhi. Though the presence of r, by changing n to ṇ, will to some extent obscure the morphology, giving words without internal sandhi is really quite unusual and to be avoided. A slight exception to this is the case of long compound words, where it frequently will be helpful to the non-Sanskritists to provide the components of the compound as well as the combined form.