The Hindu Business Line : One script for a dozen languages

KRISHNASWAMY Kasturi is an energetic octogenarian. Ever since he retired as Station Director of All India Radio he has been working on a common script for Indian languages. And the result of his work is available on www.indianlanguages-romanlipi.com.

The site, tastefully designed by www.ipwrs.com, with the technical assistance of Siddhesh and Sunetra Mukundan, offers the `Roman Lipi' font as a free download, so that you can type in transliteration of Indian languages easily.

Of immense value is what Kasturi has painstakingly compiled in charts that show `letter-sounds of all Indian languages'. He introduces a new vowel sound ü, with a phonetic value between `i' and `u'. "Take the English word `rhythm'. Now drop the letters `rh' and the last three letters `thm'. We are left with a sound which is neither `i' nor `u', but somewhere in between," Kasturi explains. Examples are words such as Krishna, Mridangam and Nadu.

"All the Indian languages together contain only 57 basic phonetic elements," avers Kasturi, and goes about the task of fitting them to the keyboard, using the 26 letters of the English alphabet and diacritical marks. "The Unicode Consortium has codified and numbered the letters of many languages of the world along with diacritical marks," informs the site.

He has provided five pages showing letters in 12 Indian languages, viz. Sanskrit, Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarathi, Marathi, Assamese, Bengali, Oriya, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, and Tamil, plus the Roman Lipi font. These are classified as vowels and vowel sounds, gutturals, palatals, linguals, dentals, labials, semi-vowels, sibilants, aspirates and nasals.

The site also provides the mapping of the keys to characters to facilitate practice. Don't miss the 31-page PDF titled, `Spoken Tamil through Roman Alphabet'. "There is a vast population of Indians who have settled abroad. The second and later generations of these Indians are out of touch with the culture and language of their origin," notes Kasturi. That, I'm afraid, may apply to the newer generations closer home too!

Any one familiar with English can acquire a working knowledge of any Indian language — at least the spoken version of it, assures Kasturi. He thinks that a multi-language lexicon can be devised for India because the script for all the languages is common. "This lexicon will be computer based and will display, in English and Indian languages, the equivalent of any word. Such an exercise has not been attempted at all so far," he notes.

His Web site provides `a microscopic sample' of such a lexicon with columns devoted to English, Punjabi, Tamil, Bengali and Gujrathi. "Many of these tasks are gigantic in content and scope," says Kasturi, wishing that a global organisation took things forward.

Softly@TheHindu.co.in

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