The All India Alphabet

My sister and I were spending last Sunday evening altering a medieval costume with several yards of fabric in the skirt, with the intention of creating Cinderella's ballgown. We had introduced a hoop and crinoline, and had flounces pinned up half way round the hemline, when we decided to adjust the length. I removed the pins, let the flounces drop and considered starting over again with a new design.

I kid you not - as I later settled in for a few minutes of reading to relax after the sewing, I picked up Colloquial Hindustani, which I had just acquired from a used book store. The book fell open to this page,

"In this simple romanic orthography, Hindustani, though appearing in clothes of new design, is still dressed in a national costume which fits it well, whereas in the usual European transliterations and transcriptions bristling with dots, dashes, and other diacritical marks, which do not really belong to the letters, it looks like a man who has lost his own clothes and has to make shift with an ill-fitting borrowed suit, pinned up here, let down there. To remove the pins and drop the fussy alterations, leaving Hindustani in the bare roman alphabet, is a great temptation to the European. And we know that the dots and dashes do, in fact, tend to wear off. The feeling that diacritics are extraneous to the roman alphabet is very strong indeed among people who do not require them. It is a sound instinct.

Unfortunately the bare unaltered roman alphabet is inadequate for the representation of Indian languages. ...

The alternative is the addition of a minimum number of extra letters of roman type, already well established, enabling us to frame a consistent Indian alphabet. The Indian roman alphabet then takes its proper plce in grammars and dictionaries. A grammatical roman spelling is established, in which all Indians can practise literacy without shame, and which opens the door to easier learning of Indian languages by foreigners of all the continents, It is the method followed in this book." p. xi

I offer this as a bit of history as well as being one possible opinion on diacritics. It is a colourful piece of writing and a perspective on why a certain orthography may or may not gain favour.

Today another roman orthography is often used for transliteration in India, ITRANS. It also lacks diacritics by virtue of being accessible in an ASCII encoding for use on the QWERTY keyboard. Just the unadorned roman alphabet. Even though many sounds require several letters to type, it may still be faster than using the shift key.

I do know that diacritics were used for many languages where the main consideration was to be able to use a typewriter, rather than have to get extra letters for printing. Orthographies are tied to the preferred technology of the day more often than not.

The additional characters of the All India Alphabet in the image above are all available in Unicode in the IPA extensions. As I said, I am posting this quote for historic interest only. I have no particular opinion on roman orthographies in India.

Harley, A. H. Colloquial Hindustani. Introduction by J.R. Firth. 1943. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. London.