26-445: Prashasti ( IAST : Praśasti, Sanskrit for "praise") is an Indian genre of inscriptions composed by poets in praise of their rulers. Most date from the 6th century CE onwards. Written in the form of poetry or ornate prose, the prashastis stereotypically constructed a genealogy, the ruler's attributes, eulogize victories, piety and typically ended with one or more announcements of generous gifts and rewards he has given. They differ from
52-568: A macron ). Vocalic (syllabic) consonants, retroflexes and ṣ ( / ʂ ~ ɕ ~ʃ/ ) have an underdot . One letter has an overdot: ṅ ( /ŋ/ ). One has an acute accent : ś ( /ʃ/ ). One letter has a line below: ḻ ( / ɭ / ) (Vedic). Unlike ASCII -only romanisations such as ITRANS or Harvard-Kyoto , the diacritics used for IAST allow capitalisation of proper names. The capital variants of letters never occurring word-initially ( Ṇ Ṅ Ñ Ṝ Ḹ ) are useful only when writing in all-caps and in Pāṇini contexts for which
78-502: A century of scholarly usage in books and journals on classical Indian studies. By contrast, the ISO 15919 standard for transliterating Indic scripts emerged in 2001 from the standards and library worlds. For the most part, ISO 15919 follows the IAST scheme, departing from it only in minor ways (e.g., ṃ/ṁ and ṛ/r̥)—see comparison below. The Indian National Library at Kolkata romanization , intended for
104-448: A deity. He is the King of Peace, the King of Prosperity, the King of Monks (bhikshus), the King of Religion (Dharma), who has been seeing, hearing and realising blessings (kalyanas), (... lost ...) accomplished in extraordinary virtues, respector of every sect, the repairer of all temples, one whose chariot and army are irresistible, one whose empire is protected by the chief of
130-560: A family of abugida writing systems . They are used throughout the Indian subcontinent , Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia . They are descended from the Brahmi script of ancient India and are used by various languages in several language families in South , East and Southeast Asia : Indo-Aryan , Dravidian , Tibeto-Burman , Mongolic , Austroasiatic , Austronesian , and Tai . They were also
156-433: A font, etc. It can be enabled in the input menu in the menu bar under System Preferences → International → Input Menu (or System Preferences → Language and Text → Input Sources) or can be viewed under Edit → Emoji & Symbols in many programs. Equivalent tools – such as gucharmap ( GNOME ) or kcharselect ( KDE ) – exist on most Linux desktop environments. Users of SCIM on Linux based platforms can also have
182-399: A scholar of South Asian inscriptions, the inscription is the first extensive panegyric record in the poetic style. The style of Rudradaman 's inscription is seen in later prashasti inscriptions. The Tamil meykeerthi inscriptions are similar to the prashastis , but feature far more standardized formats. IAST The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration ( IAST )
208-511: Is inherent . Notes Notes The Brahmi script was already divided into regional variants at the time of the earliest surviving epigraphy around the 3rd century BC. Cursives of the Brahmi script began to diversify further from around the 5th century AD and continued to give rise to new scripts throughout the Middle Ages. The main division in antiquity was between northern and southern Brahmi . In
234-623: Is a transliteration scheme that allows the lossless romanisation of Indic scripts as employed by Sanskrit and related Indic languages. It is based on a scheme that emerged during the 19th century from suggestions by Charles Trevelyan , William Jones , Monier Monier-Williams and other scholars, and formalised by the Transliteration Committee of the Geneva Oriental Congress , in September 1894. IAST makes it possible for
260-782: Is by setting up an alternative keyboard layout . This allows one to hold a modifier key to type letters with diacritical marks. For example, alt + a = ā. How this is set up varies by operating system. Linux/Unix and BSD desktop environments allow one to set up custom keyboard layouts and switch them by clicking a flag icon in the menu bar. macOS One can use the pre-installed US International keyboard, or install Toshiya Unebe's Easy Unicode keyboard layout. Microsoft Windows Windows also allows one to change keyboard layouts and set up additional custom keyboard mappings for IAST. This Pali keyboard installer made by Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC) supports IAST (works on Microsoft Windows up to at least version 10, can use Alt button on
286-678: The Kadamba , Pallava and Vatteluttu scripts, which in turn diversified into other scripts of South India and Southeast Asia. Brahmic scripts spread in a peaceful manner, Indianization , or the spread of Indian learning. The scripts spread naturally to Southeast Asia, at ports on trading routes. At these trading posts, ancient inscriptions have been found in Sanskrit, using scripts that originated in India. At first, inscriptions were made in Indian languages, but later
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#1733093785596312-599: The 7th or 8th century, include Nagari , Siddham and Sharada . The Siddhaṃ script was especially important in Buddhism , as many sutras were written in it. The art of Siddham calligraphy survives today in Japan . The tabular presentation and dictionary order of the modern kana system of Japanese writing is believed to be descended from the Indic scripts, most likely through the spread of Buddhism . Southern Brahmi evolved into
338-644: The Puranas. The earliest well known example of an extensive prashasti is the Hathigumpha inscription of Kharavela inscribed in or about the 1st-century BCE in Prakrit language and Brahmi script. The earliest prashastic inscription in classical Sanskrit language is the Junagadh rock inscription of Rudradaman (circa 150 CE), which became a prototype for Gupta era poetic prashastis in Sanskrit. According to Richard G. Salomon –
364-581: The area of Sanskrit studies make use of free OpenType fonts such as FreeSerif or Gentium , both of which have complete support for the full repertoire of conjoined diacritics in the IAST character set. Released under the GNU FreeFont or SIL Open Font License , respectively, such fonts may be freely shared and do not require the person reading or editing a document to purchase proprietary software to make use of its associated fonts. Brahmic family The Brahmic scripts , also known as Indic scripts , are
390-526: The consumer edition since XP. This is limited to characters in the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP). Characters are searchable by Unicode character name, and the table can be limited to a particular code block. More advanced third-party tools of the same type are also available (a notable freeware example is BabelMap ). macOS provides a "character palette" with much the same functionality, along with searching by related characters, glyph tables in
416-625: The convention is to typeset the IT sounds as capital letters. For the most part, IAST is a subset of ISO 15919 that merges the retroflex (underdotted) liquids with the vocalic ones ( ringed below ) and the short close-mid vowels with the long ones. The following seven exceptions are from the ISO standard accommodating an extended repertoire of symbols to allow transliteration of Devanāgarī and other Indic scripts , as used for languages other than Sanskrit. The most convenient method of inputting romanized Sanskrit
442-672: The empire (himself), descended from the family of the Royal Sage Vasu, the Great conqueror, the King, the illustrious Kharavela. The prashastis generally contained ornate titles, links to mythical legends or comparisons to deities, and often fabricated stories about wars, victories, loot and attributes. For example, they would create genealogies of the rulers linked to solar or lunar dynasties, and in their praise allude to legendary heroes from Indian myths and legends such as those found in Epics and
468-670: The opportunity to install and use the sa-itrans-iast input handler which provides complete support for the ISO 15919 standard for the romanization of Indic languages as part of the m17n library. Or user can use some Unicode characters in Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended Additional and Combining Diarcritical Marks block to write IAST. Only certain fonts support all the Latin Unicode characters essential for
494-491: The reader to read the Indic text unambiguously, exactly as if it were in the original Indic script. It is this faithfulness to the original scripts that accounts for its continuing popularity amongst scholars. Scholars commonly use IAST in publications that cite textual material in Sanskrit, Pāḷi and other classical Indian languages. IAST is also used for major e-text repositories such as SARIT, Muktabodha, GRETIL, and sanskritdocuments.org. The IAST scheme represents more than
520-464: The right side of the keyboard instead of Ctrl+Alt combination). Many systems provide a way to select Unicode characters visually. ISO/IEC 14755 refers to this as a screen-selection entry method . Microsoft Windows has provided a Unicode version of the Character Map program (find it by hitting ⊞ Win + R then type charmap then hit ↵ Enter ) since version NT 4.0 – appearing in
546-483: The romanisation of all Indic scripts , is an extension of IAST. The IAST letters are listed with their Devanagari equivalents and phonetic values in IPA , valid for Sanskrit , Hindi and other modern languages that use Devanagari script, but some phonological changes have occurred: * H is actually glottal , not velar . Some letters are modified with diacritics : Long vowels are marked with an overline (often called
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#1733093785596572-399: The same column all derive from the same Brahmi glyph. Accordingly: The transliteration is indicated in ISO 15919 . Vowels are presented in their independent form on the left of each column, and in their corresponding dependent form (vowel sign) combined with the consonant k on the right. A glyph for ka is an independent consonant letter itself without any vowel sign, where the vowel a
598-399: The scripts were used to write the local Southeast Asian languages. Hereafter, local varieties of the scripts were developed. By the 8th century, the scripts had diverged and separated into regional scripts. Some characteristics, which are present in most but not all the scripts, are: Below are comparison charts of several of the major Indic scripts, organised on the principle that glyphs in
624-435: The so-called "Cultic" genre of Indian inscriptions which praise a deity, religious founder (Buddha, Tirthankara, sub-tradition of Hinduism), guru, or sages then typically announces gifts or donations to a monastery, school, temple or a generous cause. In some epigraphic literature, a prashasti is considered synonymous with a kirti or purva , and is related to the word kirtana which implies "songs and praises of" someone or
650-513: The source of the dictionary order ( gojūon ) of Japanese kana . Brahmic scripts descended from the Brahmi script . Brahmi is clearly attested from the 3rd century BCE during the reign of Ashoka , who used the script for imperial edicts . Northern Brahmi gave rise to the Gupta script during the Gupta period , which in turn diversified into a number of cursives during the medieval period . Notable examples of such medieval scripts, developed by
676-483: The transliteration of Indic scripts according to the IAST and ISO 15919 standards. For example, the Arial , Tahoma and Times New Roman font packages that come with Microsoft Office 2007 and later versions also support precomposed Unicode characters like ī . Many other text fonts commonly used for book production may be lacking in support for one or more characters from this block. Accordingly, many academics working in
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