Re: [m17n-list] Questions about hi-itrans.mim

[Kenichi Handa]

In article <address@hidden>, विश्वासो वासुकेयः / Vishvas Vasuki 
<address@hidden> writes:

> I am much delighted by your fix. It works very well!! Terminating sentences
> is now less worrisome for me.

Thank you for testing it.  I've just committed the change.

> I have added some modifications to the file you sent me, which would
> benefit a great many people in their typing. The most important additions
> to the mapping are:
> 1. [., to ॥  ]

That has no problem.

> 2. [nk to ङ्क्] (<-- Several mappings of this type. The reasoning is that
> characters like ङ्क्  almost never appear in Indian languages written in
> devanAgarI. So, one can now simply type shankara and get शङ्कर rather than
> having to type sha~Nkara).

I don't understand the logic.  I agree that "nk" is easier
to type than "^N".  But, you wrote "ङ्क् almost never appear".
If so, why do we have to add more keys for that?

> 3. Common shortcuts inspired from the Harvard-Kyoto system, which I have
> seen used by many people, like: c to च्, z to श्, C to छ्, S to ष्.

Those has no problem either.

> The motivating factor here is that the transliteration scheme should remain
> intuitive, and one should not need to type more characters than one needs
> to. The aforementioned changes do not violate the ITRANS convention.

> I add two desiderata:
> a] It would be great if one could specify a rule which says: For consonant
> characters followed by a space, new-line or daNDa-s, omit ्. For example,
> akSha would be अक्ष, while akSh would also be अक्ष - it would be currently
> rendered a,s अक्ष् - this is good for samskrit, but inconvenient for hindI,
> where words are oft pronounced without the terminal a sound. This would
> render the map useless for samskrit typing work (which I do a lot of), but
> that can be solved by retaining the current map as sa-itrans.mim.

It's possible.  But, are space, newline, dondas enough?  How
about TAB, !, ", ', and etc?

> b] I would request that sa-itrans.mim be created from the skeleton I sent,
> so that vedic svara marks can be added ().

If we add the a] feature, we surely need sa-itrans which
doesn't have that feature.  By the way, I don't know what
"vedic svara marks" is.  Do you want to add it to sa-itrans
or hi-itrans?

> I hope you will like the changes I suggest and include them in this very
> useful package.

As I don't speak/write any Indic languages, I can't say I
like it or not.  At least, it seems that your proposal
doesn't break anything.  So, I'll adopt it after I hear your
answers to the above questions.

---
Kenichi Handa
address@hidden