How do i type Romanized Sanskṛt

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Some Background Info

Sanskṛt is one of the greatest assets of mankind, a divine gift from God.  By design of the British education policy in India, it was sidelined, minimized and almost wiped out - but many sincere and intelligent students and professors have begun a revival effort, which is gaining ground..

Three Important Discoveries

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1 - IAST (alphabets for perfect, lossless transliteration) is so simple yet 100% effective

As a 'foreigner' (one whose only fluent language is English, having been born and raised in an ex-British colony), it was very hard for me to hear and pronounce Sanskṛt or any Indian language easily.  But with my father's help I discovered that the alphabet and 100% accurate pronunciation are possible from the wonderful invention called 'IAST' - the International Alphabet for Sanskṛt Transliteration' which was established at a conference in Athens in 1912.  It provides for 'the lossless transliteration' of Sanskṛt because each and every 'alphabet' or character of Sanskṛt has one and only one corresponding IAST alphabet.  This is accomplished very simply by adding in dots and dashes above or below or above&below the ordinary English alphabets.  These dots and dashes are called diacritics and they help increase the no. of alphabets because the basic 26 alphabets of English are not enough to cover the full spectrum of Sanskṛt sounds.  The diacritics are added in in a very systematic way, following the design of the perfectly phonetic Sanskṛt alphabets.  Thus, by learning to recognize the patterns of the diacritics in this IAST (simply called Romanized Sanskṛt) a beginner who grasps it, can easily pick up the 400+ complex Sanskṛt alphabets, which would be a formidable struggle for most of us.

2 - Simplified Romanized Sanskṛt (SRS) - Learning pronunciation thru accelerated learning with fun, psycho-motor

I had struggled to pick up Sanskṛt pronunciation, being taught it the normal, traditional way, of being corrected by my dad every time I pronounced something obnoxiously, which was VERY often.... but I could not hear the differences between the right sound and the wrong ones - our ears are deaf to the sounds which lie outside the spectrum of our mother-tongue, and this fact has been proven by Prof Tomatis (so i learnt at the Language Laboratory in Auroville, where his remarkable language spectrum machine is used).  But later I discovered what I call Simplified Romanized Sanskṛt (SRS), which embodies various ways of imparting the skills thru specially designed exercises, and it proved to be very effective - within just 4 lessons of 2 hours each, we are able to train adults of any language background to develop very good Sanskṛt pronunciation and hearing.  Later on, one of my dear friends HG Padma Sambhava Das (alias Peter Ho), who is trained in Neuro Linguistic Programming and Accelerated Learning, trained me to improve my teaching methods and the effectiveness of the SRS pronunciation courses which I designed and teach.  (NZ TV interview about SRS and Gītā Jayanti -www.tiny.cc/dina-gj)

3 - Discovering the easy-to-install-&-use DiacWin utility created by Murari Das (alias Michael Best) + the advent of Unicode fonts in all new computers

Some years ago I was introduced to two free Sanskṛt typing programs by HG Gokul Candra Das of Iskcon Kuala Lumpur - they were DiacWin and Keysans.  They are not complex, heavy programs that load up and slow down your computer - they are merely 'keyboard filters' which work only when you trigger them (by typing the ; key in Diacwin), and otherwise, they sit quietly and unobtrusively in the system tray (near the clock of your computer).  Both were very easy to use, but Diacwin was easier.   And now with the advent of Unicode fonts, which means we can type with diacritics in ordinary documents, emails and for webpages directly, without having to install special fonts, the DiacWin Unicode program can very easily be distributed widely.

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Realizing that many Sanskṛt professors and students whom I interacted with were not aware of such a simple-to-install-and-use, free software, I created the site www.tiny.cc/typesanskrit for sharing the software, the skills and the inspiration to promote Sanskṛt.  The sheer numbers of Sanskṛt alphabets, the complexity of the compound alphabets, and the ineffectiveness of the traditional way of teaching Sanskṛt pronunciation are major obstacles to the spreading and revival of Sanskṛt.  As confirmed by Prof. S Mohan here 'lippi does not matter' - we may write Sanskṛt in any script, be it Devanāgarī, Romanized Sanskṛt, Telugu, Malayālam etc, so long as there is no ambiguity/duplication of the alphabets representing the various sounds.  So the above 3 discoveries, combined, can factually create a big 'tidal wave' to further the mass propagation of Sanskṛt that has already been started by so many sincere workers.

I urge all who know and love Sanskṛt to please start using this DiacWin software and install it in your computer and put it in your "All programs > Startup folder" so that it automatically launches every time you switch on your computer - I assure you it will not slow down your computer at all.  By default, when launched, it remains 'off' or 'inactive' - when you want to use it, you just have to type ALT+; to trigger it - then it is switched on.  Could anything be simplified any further?  Please do your little part to let this become the common standard for typing Sanskṛt... after all, with the Devawin converter, with a single click, one can convert the IAST Romanized text into Devanagari - typing in Devanagari is very complex and difficult, but typing in IAST is as easy as drinking water!

Svāgatām! (Welcome!)

- Dīna