Dear Dominik and other colleagues,
Thanks for bringing up this fun detail of Indic writing. I will happily adopt Steinkellner’s ‘broken pipe’ if that is what everyone votes for.
However, I have for a number of years been using § to represent this sign, which is not limited to Devanagari, and not only used at line-end, but also found around binding-holes, and sometimes in other positions and functions. My former student Andrea Acri has published this convention in his Dharma Pātañjala book (2011). See p. 85:
‘I have reproduced the line-filler sign [image] as §. This sign is used to fill any extra space before the gap reserved around the binding hole or before the right margin of a leaf.’
Examples can be found passim in Andrea’s diplomatic edition of a ca. 15th-c. Javanese manuscript. The sign is also found passim in copper-plate inscriptions from Java. In the attached example, we the sign both in its normal function, as line-filler, at the and of line 4, but also at the opening among the symbols that enclose namostu sarvvabuddhāya. In these Javanese contexts, and in the (non-Devanagari) Indian manuscripts where I have seen the sign (notably in manuscripts from Eastern Indian and Nepal in the 10th/11th-centuries), it is clearly different visually from daṇḍa. As it is also functionally different from daṇḍa, I see some advantage in my convention as against the interrupted bar, besides that the § is also easier to type for most people. (Naturally I am happiest with the only convention that I am used to...) We have so far retained § in the Transliteration Guide for the DHARMA project (https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-02272407/document).
In our discussions, Daniel Balogh has made an argument for encoding the sign as a @type of <space>, but I have so far resisted and preferred marking it up as a @type of <g>.
Note to Daniel (and to others for amusement): at the end of line 3 in the attached photo, I now find the same words that we have decided to represent as Umiṅsor= I (repha on top of initial i) in a stone inscription that was brought to our attention.
Question to Dominik: could you explain the meaning of the underlined bits, obscure to me: « I'm using Charles's Saktumiva, and the convention there (as Charles pointed out to me; I should RTFM) … »?
Best wishes to all, from Dhaka (where the Bangladesh National Museum has recently published two hefty volumes of catalogues of its Sanskrit and Bengali manuscripts — alas too heavy for me to carry back home),
Arlo
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Le 13 nov. 2019 à 03:17, Dominik Wujastyk
