Problems in Indic Transliteration

Typographic symbols __ DEV a, jha, .na __ Eyelash repha
Virama _____ Bengali t _________ Visarga, etc ________ Vedic accents

1. Typographic Symbols ____(Contents)

To illustrate from Latin script, there are symbols like '&' which represent a word ('and' in this case). In the surface structure we see & or one of a number of other forms, including some very elegant curly forms (and some slightly less elegant), depending on the font. In the deep structure these all become 'and' and would be so transliterated. So symbols like this do not need their own separate transliteration in a standard.
For special purposes, such as printing particular texts in an Indic script, typographic symbols could, if desired, be given an ad hoc coding outside the standard.
A special symbol in some Indic scripts is the mystic or sacred syllable OM. In DEV it has a curly form. In TAM it is simply spelled om (with long o), which is also the Sanskrit spelling (of which aum is a variant). The curly form may therefore be classed under surface structure.

2. DEV a, jha, .na ____ (Contents)

There are two graphic forms for each of the Devanagari script characters a, jha, .na. The variations correspond to different fonts, but in the deep structure they have the same meaning.

3. Eyelash repha & ordinary repha ____ (Contents)

Repha is the letter r before a consonant. Marathi and Nepali have two forms of repha: the usual form and the 'eyelash' form. Call these R, R', respectively. Lambert [1953, p. 125] explains that R' is used before y or h in some Marathi words, and sometimes before h in Sanskrit loan words. There are pairs of words with different meanings whose spelling differs only in the form of repha used:

      daRyaa, 'sea'
      daR'yaa, 'caves'

      aacaaRyaacaa  'one belonging to a teacher'
      aacaaR'yaacaa, 'one belonging to a cook'.

4. Virama ____ (Contents)

In any Indic script the surface structure includes various forms of ka\ (where \ denotes virama). In each case the deep structure is simply k, so virama does not produce a script element.
In Hindi and other North Indian languages, many words pronounced without a final /a/ are written without virama, while other words so pronounced are written with virama (e.g. p.rthak, arthaat, from Sanskrit). If a transliteration scheme essays to follow pronunciation and still remain reversible, then virama has to be added to the script generators. This, however, is at the cost of loss of information when the transcription is used for reading text. It is simpler to have a reversible uniform transcription in which 'k' at the end of a string always means ka\.

5. BEN t ____ (Contents)

For final t in BEN, one does not write ta\ (with virama) but uses a special form. In each font the surface structure contains ta, virama, and the special form, but in the deep structure these give only the script elements a and t.

6. Visarga, etc ____ (Contents)

Vedic works used to be written using three script characters like visarga, all with more than one form in the surface structure [Kittel, 1894]. The three are jihvâmûlîya , upadhmânîya , and visarjanîya (the old word for visarga) . At one stage, and were both written with ardhavisarga , appropriately called 'half-visarga' [Colebrooke, 1805, p.2]. All these are now written , the other forms being obsolete, though not irrelevant.
occurs only before k or kh, and only before p and ph. Because their pronunciation was different, these are three different elements of DEV when used for the Vedic language.

7. Vedic accents ____ (Contents)

The chanting of Vedic texts involves three main accents, udaatta, svarita, and anudaatta. These are marked differently in different Vedic texts [Macdonnell, 1916, Appendix III]. There are also further refinements [ISCII, Annex-G].

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