The Sanskrit Library Phonetic basic encoding scheme (SLP1) is an

ASCII ASCII ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...

transliteration Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus '' trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → and → the digraph , Cyrillic → , Armenian → or L ...

scheme for the

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; stem form ; nominal singular , ,) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in northwest South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cultural ...

language from and to the

Devanagari Devanagari ( ; in script: , , ) is an Indic script used in the Indian subcontinent. It is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental Writing systems#Segmental systems: alphabets, writing system), based on the ancient ''Brāhmī script, Brā ...

script. Differently from other transliteration schemes for Sanskrit, it can represent not only the basic Devanagari letters, but also phonetic segments, phonetic features and punctuation. SLP1 also describes how to encode classical and

Vedic Sanskrit Vedic Sanskrit, also simply referred as the Vedic language, is the most ancient known precursor to Sanskrit, a language in the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan subgroup of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family. It is atteste ...

. One of the main advantages of SLP1 is that each Devanagari letter used in Sanskrit maps to exactly one ASCII character, making it possible to create simple conversions between ASCII and Sanskrit. For example, the

Harvard-Kyoto The Harvard-Kyoto Convention is a system for transliterating Sanskrit and other languages that use the Devanāgarī script into ASCII. It is predominantly used informally in e-mail, and for electronic texts. Harvard-Kyoto system Prior to the ...

transliteration uses the single character "D" to represent "ड" and the combination "Dh" to represent "ढ". SLP1, in contrast, always uses a single character: "q" for "ड" and "Q" for "ढ". Such intermediate mappings, while convenient for the design of transliteration conversion functions, tend to hinder readability until they are re-converted to either Devanagari or the widely used

IAST The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) is a transliteration scheme that allows the lossless romanisation of Brahmic family, Indic scripts as employed by Sanskrit and related Indic languages. It is based on a scheme that ...

romanization scheme. The tables in the following sections are taken from Peter Scharf's May 2008 talk.

History

SLP1 was formally introduced in the book ''Linguistic Issues in Encoding Sanskrit'' by Peter M. Scharf and Malcolm D. Hyman as part of th
Sanskrit Library project

Vowels

The numeral "3" is suffixed to denote a prolonged vowel (''pluta svara''). For example, ओ३म् = o3m. Similarly, the numeral "1" is suffixed to denote a short "e" and "o", as in Dravidian: ऎ = e1, ऒ = o1. "1" and "3" are also used after a short and long agitated kampa respectively. Avagraha (ऽ) is represented by a single quote (').

Sonorants

Anusvāra/Visarga

Anunasika is represented by a tilde. For example, माँ = mA~. Jihvamuliya and upadhmaniya are encoded as "Z" and "V" respectively.

Consonants

Vedic accents

Udatta, anudatta and svarita are encoded as "/", "\" and "^" respectively.

External links

Sanskrit transliteration tool. Convert from one scheme to another
Maintained by the 'Indian language technology proliferation and deployment centre' (ILTP-DC) of the government of India. Works
of Harvard-Kyoto, ITRANS, Velthuis, SLP, WX-system and IAST, Devanagari used b

with 7 systems: Harvard-Kyoto, ITRANS, Velthuis, SLP, WX-system and IAST, Devanagari.

References

Sanskrit transliteration {{writingsystem-stub