[Buddha-l] Encoding nasals

[Richard Hayes]

On Jul 26, 2009, at 2:15 PM, jkirk wrote:

> Yes, indeed--I meant retroflex not alveolar.

With with tilde is palatal, not retroflex or alveolar. In all standard  
romanization schemes it is spelled n with tilde (Unicode UTF-8 ñ). As  
Jayarava has said, some Asian people choose not to transliterate their  
name but Anglicize it so it can be spelled without any diacritical  
marks at all in a way that any old gringo can approximately pronounce.  
Hence names such as Nyanaponika.

Phonetic anglicization leads to some puzzling results. It might not be  
obvious to your average Kansas tractor mechanic, for example, that  
Arvind and Aurobindo are exactly the same name, namely, Aravinda.  
Never mind Mukherjee and Mukhopadhyaya.

Richard Haze