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Harvard-Kyoto

ASCII transliteration for Indic scripts

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This article contains Indic text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks or boxes, misplaced vowels or missing conjuncts instead of Indic text.

The Harvard-Kyoto Convention^[1] is a system for transliterating Sanskrit and other languages that use the Devanāgarī script into ASCII.^{[2] [citation needed]} It is predominantly used informally in e-mail, and for electronic texts.^{[citation needed]}

Prior to the Unicode era, the following Harvard-Kyoto scheme^[3] was developed for putting a fairly large amount of Sanskrit textual material into machine readable format without the use of diacritics as used in IAST. Instead of diacritics it uses upper case letters. Since it employs both upper and lower case letters in its scheme, proper nouns' first letter capitalization format cannot be followed. Because it is without diacritics, it enables one to input texts with a minimum motion of the fingers on the keyboard. For the consonants, the differences to learn are: compared to IAST, all letters with an underdot are typed as the same letter capitalized; guttural and palatal nasals (ṅ, ñ) as the corresponding upper case voiced plosives (G, J); IAST ḷ, ḻ, ḻh are quite rare; the only transliteration that needs to be remembered is z for ś. The vowels table, the significant difference is for the sonorants and Anusvāra, visarga are capitalized instead of their diacritics. Finally, it is fairly readable with practice.

Sanskrit text encoded in the Harvard-Kyoto convention can be unambiguously converted to Devanāgarī, with two exceptions: Harvard-Kyoto does not distinguish अइ (a followed by i, in separate syllables, i.e. in hiatus) from ऐ (the diphthong ai) or अउ (a followed by u) from औ (the diphthong au). However such a vowel hiatus would occur extremely rarely inside words. Such a hiatus most often occurs in sandhi between two words (e.g. a sandhi of a word ending in 'aH' and one beginning with 'i' or 'u'). Since in such a situation a text transliterated in Harvard-Kyoto would introduce a space between the 'a' and 'i' (or 'a' and 'u') no ambiguity would result.

This method allows not only determining the correct pronunciation of Russian words but also maintains the Russian orthography, since a single Harvard-Kyoto letter corresponds to each Russian one. There is no need for diacritical signs and potential digraph confusion is prevented. All symbols are available on standard keyboards.

The Harvard-Kyoto system doesn't preserve upper-case letters, which is not an issue when only considering pronunciation. But the symbol "^", if desired, may give the hint that next letter is capitalized (^b = Б). As well, an apostrophe sign may be used to introduce a "stress" sign if necessary (za'mok – castle; zamo'k – lock).

• Devanagari transliteration
  • International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST)
  • ITRANS
  • National Library at Kolkata romanization
  • SLP1
  • Velthuis
  • WX notation

• Online Sanskrit Utilities
• Dominik Wujastyk (25 June 1996). "Transliteration of Devanāgarī". Retrieved 2014-11-24.
• Russian ↔ Harvard-Kyoto system online converter