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Einherjar
01 March 2010, 04:21 PM
I am not sure if this is the right place to post this or not, so if a mod or admin feels like it should be moved, feel free.

I have been noticing since Ive been on this site that a lot of time people, when typing out sanskrit words in roman characters, capitalize numerous letters throughout any given word. Ive also noticed that this capitalization changes sometimes. What is the reason for this use of capitalization? Does it designate a compound word or is it for the phonetic pronunciation of the word or what?

Just something Ive been noticing and trying to pick up on.

smaranam
01 March 2010, 07:41 PM
Namaste Einherjar

The capital letters are used as a standard method to show phonetics, pronunciation, where many times there is no alternative in Roman Albhabet.
and when the tool of diacritics is not available.

Are you familiar with Diacritic ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diacritic
Font like variations on letters to make different sounds in other languages.

Like this :
eṣā brāhmī sthitiḥ pārtha

naināḿ prāpya vimuhyati

sthitvāsyām anta-kāle 'pi

brahma-nirvāṇam ṛcchati



e.g.
a = a as in must, word, not far.
A == aa as in task, far,
N == Na as in KRshNa , bANAsur (baaNaasur) , praNAm (pruNaam)
which does not exist in english , where tongue touches the palate , not the teeth as with a regular n. So N is not like now, its like KrshNa.

M == am - anuswaar as in hams or hans , say haumn's - nasal with no explicit m or n. saMhItA (saunmhItA)

I == ee
T = ta as in tar road, taxi, turbo

R = ru as in Rg (rug) like foot, KR = Kru like true

and so on. Please see the sanskrt threads to learn more :

http://www.hindudharmaforums.com/showpost.php?p=34724&postcount=8


Hope that solves part of the puzzle.

ScottMalaysia
02 March 2010, 07:00 AM
The Sanskrit alphabet is more complex that the Latin one that we use. For example, in Sanskrit there are long and short vowels. English doesn't have this, so there are several ways to show it.

I'll use the name of the Gods Brahma to show this. The final 'a' on Brahma is a long 'a', different from the short 'a' at the start. In Sanskrit, each is a separate letter. But we don't have a separate letter in English that would substitute, so we need to come up with some other way. I will list the primary ways that this is done.

1. The proper scholarly way, used in transliterations of Sanskrit texts like the Bhagavad-Gita, is to use letters with markings above or below (diacritical markings). These letters are not used in English and many are only found in some fonts, making them difficult to type, especially on Internet forums.

Example 1 - Brahmā

The final 'a' has a dash called a macron on top of it to indicate that it is a long 'a'.

Second Example - Krishna

The 'r' in Krishna is different from the regular Sanskrit 'r' found in words like 'raja' and 'Rama'. It is a special 'r' that only occurs with a short 'i' after it. The 'sh' is one out of two 'sh' sounds in Sanskrit - they must be distinguished in transliteration. The 'n' is a retroflex 'n', pronounced with the tip of the tongue on the roof of the mouth.

Example - Kṛṣṇa

The 'r', 's', and 'n' have dots underneath to distinguish them from their unmarked counterparts (which are pronounced slightly differently).

2. Capital letters

Capital letters are used for sounds not found in English. This is easier when typing. In this mode of transliteration, sentences do not start with capital letters since they stand for a different Sanskrit letter than their lowercase counterparts.

Example - brahmA
Example - kRSNa

3. Double vowels

Sometimes, to show long vowels, the letter is doubled. This method only works with vowels, not consonants.

Example - brahmaa

4. Transcription

The three methods above are all transliteration. Transliteration attempts to use a one-to-one correspondence of letters and be exact, so that an informed reader should be able to reconstruct the original spelling of unknown transliterated words in the original script.

What often happens with names, however, is that they are simply transcribed - that is, the sound of the name is written in the target language in such a way that a person who sees it will be able to pronounce it correctly.

Example - Brahma
Example - Krishna

A person who knew the Devanagari alphabet but wasn't familiar with these two names would not be able to write them correctly in the Devanagari script based on the above transcriptions. The transcription doesn't show if any of the 'a's in 'Brahma' are long or not, and it doesn't show which 'sh' and 'n' are used in 'Krishna'.

Hope this helps.

Eastern Mind
02 March 2010, 07:20 AM
Vannakkam:

It's all Greek to me. Besides having a lousy ear for distinguishing, I'm an old man. I'll just have to try to continue tune into the vibration. You can't teach an old dog new tricks.

But best wishes to you young 'uns in your attempts.

Aum Namasivaya

saidevo
02 March 2010, 07:56 AM
namaste Einherjar.

There are two popular transliteration scheme for the DevanAgari alphabets of Sanskrit: Harvard-Kyoto and the ITRANS. The first scheme uses diacritical marks to denote the long vowels and other special sounds. Since typing the marks is tedious, ITRANS uses the printable ASCII characters of the keyboard, totally avoiding the diacritical marks, but in the process uses uppercase (capital) letters of the English alphabet for long vowels, plus some symbols such as '^,~' to denote special sounds.

You can find information about these schemes here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard-Kyoto
http://www.aczoom.com/itrans/TRANS.TXT

The ITRANS scheme is popular on the Net for the DevanAgari script of Indian languages.

Einherjar
02 March 2010, 02:28 PM
Very cool guys. Thanks. Things always do wind up coming out kind of weird if you're translating a language that doesn't use the latin alphabet, or uses extra characters. It makes sense though.

Will still probably take me a while to get used to it, but I'll give it a shot. And, hey, look at it this way... at least its not japanese. That stuff gets all strange when you write it out in the latin alphabet.

ScottMalaysia
02 March 2010, 09:21 PM
Will still probably take me a while to get used to it, but I'll give it a shot. And, hey, look at it this way... at least its not japanese. That stuff gets all strange when you write it out in the latin alphabet.Same goes for Chinese. I've found transliterated Chinese hard to read in the past, proably because we stopped using it in my second year of studying Chinese and read the characters alone.

There's no real problem with transliterating Japanese, except with the long vowels. But then, double letters can again be used. "Sumo" correctly transliterated would be sumō, sumoo or sumou.

Chinese, on the other hand, is a tonal language, where pronouncing words with different tones changes the meaning. "Ma" pronounced with a high tone means "mother"; "Ma" pronounced with a low tone means "to scold". Diacritical marks are therefore used in Chinese to indicate the tones.

Einherjar
04 March 2010, 01:58 AM
That's pretty cool man. I don't know a whole lot about the chinese language.