There are several somewhat similar methods of transliteration from Devanagari to the Roman script (a process sometimes called romanisation), including the influential and lossless IAST notation.
[3][4][5] The Hunterian system was developed in the nineteenth century by William Wilson Hunter, then Surveyor General of India.
[6] When it was proposed, it immediately met with opposition from supporters of the earlier practiced non-systematic and often distorting "Sir Roger Dowler method" (an early corruption of Siraj ud-Daulah) of phonetic transcription, which climaxed in a dramatic showdown in an India Council meeting on 28 May 1872 where the new Hunterian method carried the day.
The Hunterian method was inherently simpler and extensible to several Indic scripts because it systematised grapheme transliteration, and it came to prevail and gain government and academic acceptance.
[6] Opponents of the grapheme transliteration model continued to mount unsuccessful attempts at reversing government policy until the turn of the century, with one critic calling appealing to "the Indian Government to give up the whole attempt at scientific (i.e. Hunterian) transliteration, and decide once and for all in favour of a return to the old phonetic spelling.
"[7] Over time, the Hunterian method extended in reach to cover several Indic scripts, including Burmese and Tibetan.
For instance, long vowels were marked with an accent diacritic in the original version, but this was later replaced in the 1954 Government of India update with a macron.
The Hunterian system has faced criticism over the years for not producing phonetically accurate results and being "unashamedly geared towards an English-language receiver audience.
ISO 15919 defines the common Unicode basis for Roman transliteration of South-Asian texts in a wide variety of languages/scripts.
This is a prerequisite for all modern platforms so that ISO 15919 has become the new standard for digital libraries and archives for transliterating all South Asian texts.
[citation needed] The disadvantage of the above ASCII schemes is case-sensitivity, implying that transliterated names may not be capitalised.
This difficulty is avoided with the system developed in 1996 by Frans Velthuis for TeX, loosely based on IAST, in which case is irrelevant.
[19] The advantage of SLP1 over other encodings is that a single ASCII character is used for each Devanagari letter, a peculiarity that eases reverse transliteration.
ISO 15919 includes a so-called "limited character set" option to replace the diacritics by prefixes, so that it is ASCII-compatible.
Devanāgarī consonants include an "inherent a" sound, called the schwa, that must be explicitly represented with an "a" character in the transliteration.
Similarly, software and user interfaces released and promoted in India are in English, as is much of the computer education available there.
Due to low awareness of Devanagari keyboard layouts, many Indian users type Hindi in the Roman script.
As most Indians are familiar with the Roman script through the English language (which traditionally does not use diacritics), these transliteration systems are much less widely known.
Post-Harappan India had no system for writing Indic languages until the creation (in the 4th-3rd centuries BCE) of the Kharoshti and Brahmi scripts.
The earliest physical text in Sanskrit is a rock inscription by the Western Kshatrapa ruler Rudradaman, written c. 150 CE in Junagadh, Gujarat.
However, since the late Middle Ages, there has been a tendency to use Devanagari for writing Sanskrit texts for a widespread readership.
Müller's London typesetters competed with their Petersburg peers working on Böhtlingk's and Roth's dictionary in cutting all the required ligature types.
The sibilants IAST ṣ and ś he expressed with spiritus asper and lenis, respectively (sʽ, sʼ).