Transliterating Sanskrit, and its derivatives such as Pali, remains an annoying problem.\u00a0 The problem isn’t with the language itself; Sanskrit’s wonderfully precise and clear about sounds and letters.\u00a0 Likewise, there’s no issue with scripts or alphabets.\u00a0 You might think that there is some mystical connection between the script that a language is written in and the language itself but that’s really not the case.\u00a0 Sanskrit in India is written in Devanagari but there’s no special reason to use Devanagari for Sanskrit instead of the Latin alphabet or another one.\u00a0 Plus, Sanskrit’s only been written in Devanagari for a comparatively short period of time.<\/p>\n
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(Surprisingly, the alphabet was only invented once and all alphabets are genetically related to each other, branches from this one root.\u00a0 Devanagari is linked to Latin letters via Brahmi and Aramaic.)<\/p>\n
But in order to write Sanskrit correctly, you need some Latin letters not used in English.\u00a0 This is a common-enough situation; think of accent marks, or the French and Portuguese cedilla — \u00e7 — or the Spanish enye — \u00f1 — or even Mot\u00f6rhead’s heavy metal umlaut<\/a>.\u00a0 So, for example, “Devanagari” ought to be written “Devan\u0101gar\u012b” and “Pali” should be “P\u0101\u1e37i.”\u00a0 The complete set of diacritics for Pali is: \u0101, \u012b, \u016b, \u1e41, \u1e47, \u00f1, \u1e6d, \u1e0d, \u1e45, \u1e37 .<\/p>\n There’s another, separate but related, issue about when to use these ‘extra’ letters and marks; for native English readers, the argument goes, these ‘extra’ letters and marks — called diacritics — are distracting and make the words harder to read.<\/p>\n Specialists typically prefer to preserve diacritics, because losing them changes the meaning of the word in its original language.\u00a0 The question comes down to: “when do these foreign words become English words?”\u00a0 There’s an active debate going on now on H-Buddhism, an academic Buddhist studies mailing list on this very topic.\u00a0 Dictionaries are split on the issue, with some words preserving diacriticals and others losing them: for more on this, see the list of Buddhist Terms Found in English Print Dictionaries<\/em><\/a> and Gerald Jackson’s series on fonts and diacritics<\/a> in academic publishing.<\/p>\n The problem arises when you need to write diacritics in your friendly word processing application.\u00a0 This immediately leads to a technical conversation about Unicode and Unicode fonts.\u00a0 Which is when things start to get hairy.<\/p>\n The best starting point for Unicode issues is Alan Wood’s page<\/a>,\u00a0 It’s worth reading for the introduction, as an overview of the topic of digital transcription.\u00a0 More specifically, for the topic at hand, the Tibetan & Himalayan Digital Library has a good survey of Unicode fonts<\/a> for transliterating “Indo-Tibetan” languages.<\/p>\n (By Indo-Tibetan they mean Indian languages for Buddhist studies, including Sanskrit, Pali, Gandhari, and so on, plus Tibetan.\u00a0 “Indo-Tibetan” isn’t a language family like Indo-European but the term point to the very close relationship between Tibet and India.\u00a0 Buddhist Tibetan is a specialized language unreadable to a native Tibetan, optimized a thousand years ago to translate Buddhist Sanksrit into Tibetan.\u00a0 Smart people have been dealing with these issues for a long time.)<\/p>\n They make the point<\/a> that not all Unicode fonts contain the necessary characters, so simply choosing a Unicode font isn’t enough: “To properly display all the diacritic marks used in Indo-Tibetan studies, a Unicode font must contain the following character ranges:<\/p>\n For Pali, this is the Unicode set:<\/p><\/div>\n\n