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















Le 13 nov. 2019 à 03:17, Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk@gmail.com> a écrit :

Thanks everyone.  I'm using Charles's Saktumiva, and the convention there (as Charles pointed out to me; I should RTFM) is to use the broken pipe character, "¦".  So that's what I'm doing now.  

For my purposes, I do need to distinguish this char from a daṇḍa, because it's functionally different, and because I want it to show up in my apparatus in places where I don't want the daṇḍa to show up.  It's even written slightly differently in some MSS, with a little bottom-serif/flourish.

Like Patrick, I don't see a word-separation function in my MSS usage.  It's really a line-filler or Randausgleich "margin-equalizer".  So is a hyphen, though.  So is there any good reason not to think of these as hyphens?  NB hyphenation practices differ greatly between languages and even between UK and USA English, so the fact that these line-fillers are not being used as etymologically-determined word- or syllable-separators isn't a reason not to call them hyphens.

Best,
Dominik
_______________________________________________
Indic-texts mailing list
Indic-texts@lists.tei-c.org
http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/indic-texts