Sanskrit has a number of Romanization schemes, the most widely used today being the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST).

History

Originating in a purely oral culture, Sanskrit has no single script associated with it. Since the late Middle Ages, the script used by Indian scholars was predominantly Devanagari.

Western scholars in the 19th century adopted Devanagari for printed editions of Sanskrit texts. The editio princeps of the Rigveda by Max Müller was in Devanagari, a typographical tour de force at the time. Müller's London typesetters competed with their Petersburg peers working on Böhtlingk's and Roth's dictionary in cutting all the required ligature types.

From its beginnings, Western Sanskrit philology also felt the need for a romanized spelling of the language. Franz Bopp in 1816 used a romanization scheme, alongside Devanagari, differring from IAST in expressing vowel length by a circumflex (â, î, û), and aspiration by a spiritus asper (e.g. bʽ for IAST bh). The sibilants IAST ṣ and ś he expressed with spiritus asper and lenis, respectively (sʽ, sʼ). Monier-Williams in his 1899 dictionary used ṡ and sh for IAST ś and ṣ, respectively.

From the late 19th century, Western

IAST

The IAST standard was established by the Congress of Orientalists at Athens in 1912. The Sanskrit phones in their traditional order are transcribed as follows:

ASCII schemes

In the late 20th century, typesetting Sanskrit on computers became an issue. Lacking diacritics led to the innovation of ASCII only romanization schemes. With the wide availability of Unicode aware web browsers in the 2000s, most online publications switched to IAST, but ASCII only schemes remain popular in email correspondence because of their ease of entry. The disadvantage of ASCII schemes is that letter case is meaningful, so that transliterated names may not be capitalized.

Harvard-Kyoto

ITRANS

ITRANS has the scope of ASCII transliteration of all Indic scripts, and thus Sanskrit only uses a subset of ITRANS signs.

See also

• The National Library at Calcutta romanization, and ISO 15919 are extensions of IAST to transcribe all Indic scripts.
• ISCII is an 8-bit encoding for Indic scripts