What is transliteration?
From Wiki : Transliteration can form an essential part of transcription which converts text from one writing system into another.
In India, we use several systems for transliterations, however, most of the commonly used ones are horribly inefficient. The officially and most commonly used one is Hunterian transliteration, which has huge flaws in distinguishing between many sounds.
The dental and retroflex consonants are not distinguished, neither is vowel length. For South Asian languages, these are crucial to the word's pronunciation and meaning. For example, Bharat (the name) and Bharat (India) are written the same in this system. So is dal/daal (lentils) and dal/daal (to put, Hindi). You have big shifts in meaning. There are lots of other examples, if you look for them.
Why is correct transliteration for Indian languages important?
From the preface of Sheldon Pollock's Literary Cultures in History : Reconstructions from South Asia,
"South Asian writers have always been remarkably attentive to the correct use of language, showing as profound a concern for grammatical exactitude as for any other feature of literary composition. Ancient Sanskrit stories tell of beings coming to grief because of a mispronounced word: the son of the divine Tvaṣṭr̥ , for example, famously become a victim instead of a victor of the god Indra because his father misplaced the accent when announcing his name at birth. Later poets would ridicule their rivals for failure to discriminate between long and short vowels, as in Tenāli Rāmaliñgaḍu’s parody of Allasani Peddanna, recounted by V. Narayana Rao in this book."
"The guide to pronunciation aims to make as clear as possible to the nonspecialist reader the practical significance of these sometimes extremely subtle distinctions—whose importance to the literary traditions derives in part precisely from their subtlety."
While texting, it's not really important to be accurate. You can tell from context almost always. Informal contexts allow for great freedom because the point is to communicate rather than to be accurate.
However, while talking about concepts or ideas or even things that are India specific, talking about places, and in official or academic contexts to remove disambiguity, and most importantly - while transcribing languages, toponymy or texts from native languages - it's very important that words are transliterated right, to provide the specific pronunciation and nature of the word.
On a slight detour : Chinese has a concept of tone, where every syllable carries a certain intonation that gives it a distinct meaning. For example, ma can mean mother, horse, hemp, or scold depending on its tone. Chinese has its own official system of transcribing the sounds of its characters, called Pinyin. This system conveys the tonal information with diacritic marks. Without pinyin, or indeed any standard system for romanizing Chinese that includes provisions to show tones, it's impossible to learn for someone not familiar with the language. Nali can mean here, or where, based on the tone alone. De can have three possible meanings without the tone being specified. In fact, so important are tones in Chinese that they are said to be as important as the vowels in Chinese. And if the vowels themselves are written (they obviously have to be), then the tones do as well - and they are.
How is this relevant you ask? Well, just as tones have a significant role in determining the meaning of a word, vowel length, aspiration, and voiced/unvoiced, dental/retroflex contrasts also play a very significant role in Indo Aryan and Dravidian languages. (Spread over and official in : India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Maldives).
But in spite of their great importance they are ignored in transliteration for all practical and even official purposes.
There are systems to address this inadequacy. They include:
From Wiki : Transliteration can form an essential part of transcription which converts text from one writing system into another.
In India, we use several systems for transliterations, however, most of the commonly used ones are horribly inefficient. The officially and most commonly used one is Hunterian transliteration, which has huge flaws in distinguishing between many sounds.
The dental and retroflex consonants are not distinguished, neither is vowel length. For South Asian languages, these are crucial to the word's pronunciation and meaning. For example, Bharat (the name) and Bharat (India) are written the same in this system. So is dal/daal (lentils) and dal/daal (to put, Hindi). You have big shifts in meaning. There are lots of other examples, if you look for them.
Why is correct transliteration for Indian languages important?
From the preface of Sheldon Pollock's Literary Cultures in History : Reconstructions from South Asia,
"South Asian writers have always been remarkably attentive to the correct use of language, showing as profound a concern for grammatical exactitude as for any other feature of literary composition. Ancient Sanskrit stories tell of beings coming to grief because of a mispronounced word: the son of the divine Tvaṣṭr̥ , for example, famously become a victim instead of a victor of the god Indra because his father misplaced the accent when announcing his name at birth. Later poets would ridicule their rivals for failure to discriminate between long and short vowels, as in Tenāli Rāmaliñgaḍu’s parody of Allasani Peddanna, recounted by V. Narayana Rao in this book."
"The guide to pronunciation aims to make as clear as possible to the nonspecialist reader the practical significance of these sometimes extremely subtle distinctions—whose importance to the literary traditions derives in part precisely from their subtlety."
While texting, it's not really important to be accurate. You can tell from context almost always. Informal contexts allow for great freedom because the point is to communicate rather than to be accurate.
However, while talking about concepts or ideas or even things that are India specific, talking about places, and in official or academic contexts to remove disambiguity, and most importantly - while transcribing languages, toponymy or texts from native languages - it's very important that words are transliterated right, to provide the specific pronunciation and nature of the word.
On a slight detour : Chinese has a concept of tone, where every syllable carries a certain intonation that gives it a distinct meaning. For example, ma can mean mother, horse, hemp, or scold depending on its tone. Chinese has its own official system of transcribing the sounds of its characters, called Pinyin. This system conveys the tonal information with diacritic marks. Without pinyin, or indeed any standard system for romanizing Chinese that includes provisions to show tones, it's impossible to learn for someone not familiar with the language. Nali can mean here, or where, based on the tone alone. De can have three possible meanings without the tone being specified. In fact, so important are tones in Chinese that they are said to be as important as the vowels in Chinese. And if the vowels themselves are written (they obviously have to be), then the tones do as well - and they are.
How is this relevant you ask? Well, just as tones have a significant role in determining the meaning of a word, vowel length, aspiration, and voiced/unvoiced, dental/retroflex contrasts also play a very significant role in Indo Aryan and Dravidian languages. (Spread over and official in : India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Maldives).
But in spite of their great importance they are ignored in transliteration for all practical and even official purposes.
There are systems to address this inadequacy. They include:
- The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration scheme
- The National Library at Kolkata romanization, a modification of the above
- The ISO 15919 system, the most inclusive one yet.
In this blog, I'll be using the last scheme unless stated. However, for place names, already Anglicized nouns and writers' names, English spelling will be used.
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