From: Bob Eaton (pete_dembrowski@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri Apr 29 2005 - 08:25:10 CST
>>yūnikōḍa kyā hai?
>>
>>yūnikōḍa pratyēka akṣara kē li'ē ēka viśēṣa nambara pradāna
>>karatā hai,
>>cāhē kō'ī bhī plaiṭaphŏrma hō,
>>cāhē kō'ī bhī prōgrāma hō,
>>cāhē kō'ī bhī bhāṣā hō.
>
>This seems a bit mechanical to me, because in transliteration you'll have
>to drop many inherent vowels (at the end of most words (but not in sanskrit
>loanwords, and not after y, l ...), and in a syllable before a non-inherent
>vowel (करता is kartā, not karatā), and in each syllable between
>two syllables with vowels, and...):
[...]
>Resolving ambiguity of औ au / ऐ ai and अउ a'u / अइ a'i with an
>apostroph seems not that good idea. Using digraphs au / ai for the first
>ones to enable backward transliteration might be a good idea, if they can
>be encoded in unicode (besides, I don't think अउ a'u / अइ a'i will
>ever occure in hindi, you'd rather write अय ay / अव av).
In fact, the transliterator here is called "Devanagari-Latin" and is not
necessarily related to Hindi. In order to make it reversible for any
arbitrary Devanagari (for the many minority languages in South Asia that
also use Devanagari), these "infilicities" were necessary.
Bob
P.S. Check out http://scripts.sil.org/EncCnvtrs for a package that includes
a .Net wrapper for these ICU transliterators allowing them to be used (more
easily) in .Net/COM enabled programs (VBA, C#, etc).
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