xNagari

The Scheme for Transliteration from DevaNagari to Latin

I. Introduction

This scheme is lossless; i.e. the DevaNagari text trans-literated to Roman-Latin text using this scheme can be exactly transliterated back to DevaNagari.

Most encodings (including Unicode, ISCII) support at least basic Latin alphabet and punctuation marks.

DevaNagari text used to be encoded in various hacked-encodings and ISCII. But now Nagari text is generally encoded in Unicode while basic Latin text is encoded either in ASCII, ANSI or Unicode. Using this scheme we will be able to write languages (that support DevaNagari) like Hindi and Marathi in ASCII or ANSI encodings.

This scheme can be used for -

#	writing Hindi (or Marathi) in English alphabet for those who are not comfortable with corresponding Indian Scripts (like DevaNagari).
#	representing Indian Languages in small (handheld) devices incapable of displaying Unicode encoded DevaNagari, like old mobile phones!
#	entering (inputting) DevaNagari text using English (Roman-Latin) alphabets. But the use of such schemes for entering DevaNagari text is rather limited as efficient keyboard drivers (like iNagari) for popular computer systems are available now-a-days.
#	to convey the proper pronunciation of Indic words written in Latin-Roman alphabet.

At present this scheme is only for regular DevaNagari alphabet that is used to write Hindi, Marathi etc. This scheme will be extended in future to include those DevaNagari characters which are sometimes used in Sanskrit.

I designed this scheme such that -

#	the DevaNagari words transliterated to Latin using this scheme resemble commonly (naively) transliterated words (by general public) as closely as possible.
#	the DevaNagari words transliterated to Latin using this scheme can be used as filenames.

But the utmost importance was given to 'losslessness', 'simplicity' and 'clarity'.

xNagari is partially similar to an existing scheme called 'Harvard-Kyoto'! Other schemes for writing Indian languages using Latin alphabet are IAST (International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration) and ITRANS (based on 'Harvard-Kyoto'). Recently, Google released beta version of its transliteration service. Depending on my experience (Oh yes! at least I have been using 'xNagari' ;-) and Google's Devanāgarī-Roman Character Mappings, I made some changes in the xNagari.

II. Conventions / Terminology

Lots of Hindi-Nagari words used in this document are written using this scheme! Exception are those words (like DevaNagari, Hindi, DevaNagari, Marathi, etc) which are generally known to lots of Netizens.

Using this key we may write, Hindi as 'hindee' and DevaNagari as 'devaanaagaree'. But we won't always use transliterated words, for simple reason that this text is not meant to be transliterated to Nagari. But to emphasis correct pronunciation we can write words written using this scheme in parenthesis along with word in DevaNagari. For Example Marathi (maraaThee; मराठी).

I have used the words - 'scheme' and 'key' synonymously.

I have also written shorter form of 'DevaNagari', i.e. 'Nagari'. People also spell 'Devnagari'.

The DevaNagari alphabet is called varnamala (varNNamaalaa; वर्णमाला). Akshar (AkShar; अक्षर) means letter or letters, matra (maatraa; मात्रा) means marks.

III. Case-Sensitivity of This Scheme

Please remember that this key is case-sensitive.
NO CAPITALIZATION IS ALLOWED.

There are two reasons -

#	there are fewer alphabets in Latin than Nagari, so we have to use uppercase (capital) letters and lowercase letters for different Nagari Letters! For example 'd' is used for 'द' while 'D' is used for 'ड'.
#	Devanagari has no concept of capitalization.

If you want to emphasize a word, prefix it with a 'Low Line' character ('_', which is also called 'Underscore'!). This leading underscore can also convey that the first letter of the following word is in uppercase.

For Example: _varNNamaalaa

This convention (of starting a word with '_') will also prevent automatic capitalization, which lot of word processors do without even asking the user! So use a leading underscore, if you think your text may undergo automatic capitalization.

Generally 'राम' gets written as 'Rama' in English text. According to xNagari writing 'Rama' is incorrect, we have to write either 'raam' or '_raam'. Writing '_raam' will prevent automatic capitalization.

For ALL CAPS, you can use leading as well as trailing underscore! Instead of RAMAYANA (all caps) you can write _raamaayaNNa_.

If you ever-ever need to use '_' write '__' (two consecutive underscores)!

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