purna viraam

[Sohom Datta]

hey for the devanagri script, wouldn't it be proper to have the period
key function as the purna viraam (vertical line), since thats the
proper ending to most devangari sentences.

[kedar mhaswade]

Well, it depends. I think the transliteration team chose to be "verbatim" here. If you wanted दंड, use | since it is already available ASCII representation for it. The period is again, just a period and some languages (e.g. मराठी) use it to signal the end of a statement (just like English). Since '.' might be required not just to signal the end of the statement in Hindi and Sanskrit as well, it was a straightforward choice, you know. Otherwise, we would have needed another transliteration for a '.' that looks like '.'. I think current system is optimal.

-Kedar

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[Alok Kumar]

> here. If you wanted दंड, use | since it is already available ASCII
> representation for it. The period is again, just a period and some languages

| is not the same as । - they are different characters. Just as I, l
and | are different from each other even though they may look the same
Even though because two characters look the same, we have to
understand that the visual representation and the encoding are
different aspects.
For example writing ख as रव *may* make a human understand what's being
written but not a machine.

2009/11/19 kedar mhaswade <kedar.m...@gmail.com>:

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Can't see Hindi? http://devanaagarii.net

[kedar mhaswade]

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 6:11 AM, Alok Kumar <alok....@gmail.com> wrote:

> here. If you wanted दंड, use | since it is already available ASCII
> representation for it. The period is again, just a period and some languages

| is not the same as । - they are different characters. Just as I, l
and | are different from each other even though they may look the same
Even though because two characters look the same, we have to
understand that the visual representation and the encoding are
different aspects.
For example writing ख as रव *may* make a human understand what's being
written but not a machine.

Now I am intrigued. Your explanation does not make sense to me yet. What I mean is the "big brother system" aka Google Transliteration server should treat '|' (The ASCII pipe character) as  दंड, that's all! I am not saying that the ubiquitous '|' character and दंड are the same! If the system is not translating | to दंड, then it should consider doing so. It's all about ease of use. Otherwise as far as देवनागरी  is concerned, users should stick to something like Harvard-Kyoto and remember it (which is less user-friendly, but solves the problem of one-one mapping between transliterated text and Unicode sequence).

-Kedar

[Alok Kumar]

2009/11/19 kedar mhaswade <kedar.m...@gmail.com>:

> Now I am intrigued. Your explanation does not make sense to me yet. What I
> mean is the "big brother system" aka Google Transliteration server should
> treat '|' (The ASCII pipe character) as  दंड, that's all! I am not saying

Ah! I take that back. Well yes, the . or the | could map to । in
transliteration.
I am, in fact, not a big user of the translitaration tool but just
stick around to help people with display and config issues.

Nice knowing you,
Alok