ISO 15919 is an international standard on the romanization of many Brahmic scripts, which was agreed upon in 2001 by a network of the national standards institutes of 157 countries.[citation needed] However, the Hunterian transliteration system is the "national system of romanization in India" and a United Nations expert group noted about ISO 15919 that "there is no evidence of the use of the system either in India or in international cartographic products."[1][2][3]
The ALA-LC romanization was approved by the Library of Congress and the American Library Association and is a US standard. The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) is not a standard (as no specification exists for it) but a convention developed in Europe for the transliteration of Sanskrit rather than the transcription of Brahmic scripts.
As a notable difference, both international standards, ISO 15919 and UNRSGN[5] transliterate anusvara as ṁ, while ALA-LC and IAST use ṃ for it. However, ISO 15919 provides guidance towards disambiguating between various anusvara situations (such as labial versus dental nasalizations), which is described in the table below.
The table below shows the differences between ISO 15919, UNRSGN[5] and IAST for Devanagari transliteration.
Devanagari
ISO 15919
UNRSGN
IAST
Comment
ए / े
ē
e
e
To distinguish between long and short 'e' in Dravidian languages, 'e' now represents ऎ / ॆ (short). The use of ē is considered optional in ISO 15919, and using e for ए (long) is acceptable for languages that do not distinguish long and short e.
ओ / ो
ō
o
o
To distinguish between long and short 'o' in Dravidian languages, 'o' now represents ऒ / ॊ (short). The use of ō is considered optional in ISO 15919, and using o for ओ (long) is acceptable for languages that do not distinguish long and short o.
ऋ / ृ
r̥
ṛ
ṛ
In ISO 15919, ṛ is used to represent ड़.
ॠ / ॄ
r̥̄
ṝ
ṝ
For consistency with r̥
ऌ / ॢ
l̥
l̤
ḷ
In ISO 15919, ḷ is used to represent ळ.
ॡ / ॣ
l̥̄
l̤̄
ḹ
For consistency with l̥
◌ं
ṁ
ṁ
ṃ
ISO 15919 has two options about anusvāra. (1) In the simplified nasalization option, an anusvāra is always transliterated as ṁ. (2) In the strict nasalization option, anusvāra before a class consonant is transliterated as the class nasal—ṅ before k, kh, g, gh, ṅ; ñ before c, ch, j, jh, ñ; ṇ before ṭ, ṭh, ḍ, ḍh, ṇ; n before t, th, d, dh, n; m before p, ph, b, bh, m. ṃ is sometimes used to specifically represent the Gurmukhi tippi ੰ.
ṅ ñ ṇ n m
◌ँ
m̐
m̐
Vowel nasalization is transliterated as a tilde above the transliterated vowel (over the second vowel in the case of a digraph such as aĩ, aũ), except in Sanskrit.
Font support
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (September 2016)
Only certain fonts support all Latin Unicode characters for the transliteration of Indic scripts according to this standard. For example, Tahoma supports almost all the characters needed. Arial and Times New Roman font packages that come with Microsoft Office 2007 and later also support most Latin Extended Additional characters like ḍ, ḥ, ḷ, ḻ, ṁ, ṅ, ṇ, ṛ, ṣ and ṭ.
There is no standard keyboard layout for ISO 15919 input but many systems provide a way to select Unicode characters visually. ISO/IEC 14755 refers to this as a screen-selection entry method.
^ISO 15919 gives two options for transliterating the characters in this row: either as ṁ, or, if there is a stop or nasal following, as the corresponding homorganic nasal.
References
^United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2007), Technical reference manual for the standardization of geographical names, United Nations Publications, 2007, ISBN978-92-1-161500-5, ... ISO 15919 ... There is no evidence of the use of the system either in India or in international cartographic products ... The Hunterian system is the actually used national system of romanization in India ...
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