Re: Sanskrit romanization (was: Yellowblue (was Re: Quest for colours: what's basic then?))

>This is probably OK as a quick and dirty system, but the original system
>apparently meant to have one roman letter per Devanagari symbol;
>specifically, the Vocalic r and l characters are not the same as
consonantal
>r/l.
That's it; the system presented in that webpage is a
_transliteration_ scheme from Devanagari whose purpose
there is to facilitate a Romanized querying and displaying
of Sanskrit words in the online dictionary of that site.


>As I already mentioned, there is no "z" in Devanagari (there may be a
symbol
>for it in derived systems, but I don't know...)-- since the original
system
>had "z S s" corresponding to the 3 s-sounds, I assumeed the z stood for
>palatal, S for retro., s for dental.
Yes, there is a modified letter for z in Hindi (the one
for j with a dot below). Probably that's why I didn't
notice the presence of z in the transliteration scheme and
overlooked that, since the sound is alien to Sanskrit, the
z there was probably (and awkwardly) being used for one of
the sh's.


>>And isn't G an allophone of J, so it could be
>> represented as just ny?
>IIRC Skt. velar nasal is not contrastive, but occurs only before the velar
>stops; but I'm not sure you'd want to call it an allophone of J, i.e. the
>palatal nasal.  It's possible too, that confusion might arise between "ng"
>[N] and {Ng], which you'd have to write "ngg" as Indonesian does.
Remember that it is not a _phonemic_ representation,
but a _transliteration_ from Devanagari.

AFAIK, the only use of the Devanagari letters for "ng"
and "ny" is before velar and palatal consonants, that
is, the sounds are simply allophones of a coda nasal
archiphoneme, and those letters were put there mainly
to "round up" the chart.


>>And is there r, or just R?
>Not sure what you mean here.  But there is a "vocalic" r (usually
>transcribed as r with subscript dot = R in the Indologie system above)
Sometimes, the vocalic r is transcribed "ri", as in
"Krishna".

Cheers,
Javier