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• #TYPING DIACRITICAL MARKS SERIES#

If you hand me a book - or send me a text file by e-mail - it should appear to me exactly as it did to you.

#TYPING DIACRITICAL MARKS SERIES#

Typing an a-macron should not call for a long series of keystrokes (e.g., Alt-Ctl-Shift-Esc-a). Writing Pali should not be a cumbersome exercise in keyboard gymnastics. Each phoneme (sound) should be unambiguously represented by a unique letter or combination of letters. The written text should precisely and accurately capture the phonetic content. A newcomer to Pali, upon seeing a t with a dot-under, should be able to guess immediately that the letter stands for some variant of a t sound. It is better to modify an existing letter with a small diacritic than to introduce an entirely new character that may look like an alien squiggle to the uninitiated. It should introduce a minimum of special characters that are not already present in the alphabet. It should be readable by a wide audience.Evaluating the methodsĪ good written phonetic representation of Pali - indeed, of any language - using one's native alphabet as a starting point should aspire to each of the following ideals:

These range from giving ordinary punctuation marks double-duty as stand-ins for diacritics, to designing special diacritic fonts (all of which are incompatible with each other), and everything in between. In the absence of a universally accepted computer representation of non-ASCII characters, students of non-European languages were left to invent their own stopgap methods. The extended-ASCII set, which soon followed, offered a suite of additional special symbols, including many required for northern- and eastern- European alphabets. Unfortunately, the first personal computers failed to address the typographic challenge of diacritics, as they were designed around a very limited character set (ASCII) that was only barely able to accommodate the upper- and lower-case roman letters, ten digits, and a modest sprinkling of punctuation marks. Until well into the mid-20 th century, Pali typefaces using these characters were used almost exclusively by specialty book publishers a scholar's day-to-day duties of transcribing, translating, and editing had to be laboriously carried out with typewriter, pen, and a steady hand with which to apply the diacritics.