ISO e generally represents short ए / ॆ, but optionally represents long ए / े in Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, and Odia script. The following seven exceptions are from the ISO standard accommodating an extended repertoire of symbols to allow transliteration of Devanāgarī and other Indic scripts, as used for languages other than Sanskrit. The capital variants of letters never occurring word-initially ( Ṇ Ṅ Ñ Ṝ) are useful only when writing in all-caps and in Pāṇini contexts for which the convention is to typeset the IT sounds as capital letters.įor the most part, IAST is a subset of ISO 15919 that merges: the retroflex (underdotted) liquids with the vocalic ones ( ringed below) and the short close-mid vowels with the long ones. Unlike ASCII-only romanizations such as ITRANS or Harvard-Kyoto, the diacritics used for IAST allow capitalization of proper names. Vocalic (syllabic) consonants, retroflexes and ṣ ( / ʂ~ ɕ~ʃ/) have an underdot. Some letters are modified with diacritics: Long vowels are marked with an overline. The IAST letters are listed with their Devanagari equivalents and phonetic values in IPA, valid for Sanskrit, Hindi and other modern languages that use Devanagari script, but some phonological changes have occurred: The Indian National Library at Kolkata romanization, intended for the romanisation of all Indic scripts, is an extension of IAST. For the most part, ISO 15919 follows the IAST scheme, departing from it only in minor ways (e.g., ṃ/ṁ and ṛ/r̥)-see comparison below. By contrast, the ISO 15919 standard for transliterating Indic scripts emerged in 2001 from the standards and library worlds. The IAST scheme represents more than a century of scholarly usage in books and journals on classical Indian studies. IAST is also used for major e-text repositories such as SARIT, Muktabodha, GRETIL, and. University scholars commonly use IAST in publications that cite textual material in Sanskrit, Pāḷi and other classical Indian languages. 5 Computer input by selection from a screen.4 Computer input by alternative keyboard layout.It is this faithfulness to the original scripts that accounts for its continuing popularity amongst scholars. IAST makes it possible for the reader to read the Indic text unambiguously, exactly as if it were in the original Indic script. It is based on a scheme that emerged during the nineteenth century from suggestions by Charles Trevelyan, William Jones, Monier Monier-Williams and other scholars, and formalised by the Transliteration Committee of the Geneva Oriental Congress, in September 1894. The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration ( IAST) is a transliteration scheme that allows the lossless romanisation of Indic scripts as employed by Sanskrit and related Indic languages. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks or boxes, misplaced vowels or missing conjuncts instead of Indic text. For the distinction between, / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).