Diacritic characters based on the Indic syllabary

Note: This diacritic table does not correspond to the standard IPA chart. Rather, it comports with the syllabic system of writing used in most Indian languages. Also known as the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST), this is the most familiar system of transcription in India. However, since modern Indian languages, such as Hindi, no longer use the mid central vowel ‘schwa’ at the end of most words, we have deleted this phoneme derived from the Sanskrit from our entries so that they are closer to current pronunciation: for example, ‘Dalit’ rather than ‘Dalita’. Further, many of the words in our lexicon have long been familiar to the Indian public in the Roman script, even if not quite accurate in terms of their phonological representation: ‘dharma’ or ‘kahani’, for instance. Given this complex orthographic scenario, we have provided the familiar ‘demotic’ version followed by the IAST transcription in the case of each of our keywords but then reverted to the more usual form for ease of reading. The stylistic choice made in this volume to have diacritic marks on capital letters is also slightly unusual. Finally, despite the careful attention that we have attempted to pay to these issues of transcription, errors and idiosyncratic uses remain. For these, we apologise most sincerely.