WX_notation

WX notation

WX notation

Transliteration for Indian languages


WX notation is a transliteration scheme for representing Indian languages in ASCII. This scheme originated at IIT Kanpur for computational processing of Indian languages, and is widely used among the natural language processing (NLP) community in India. The notation (though unidentified) is used, for example, in a textbook on NLP from IIT Kanpur.[1] The salient features of this transliteration scheme are: Every consonant and every vowel has a single mapping into Roman. Hence it is a prefix code,[2] advantageous from a computation point of view. Typically the small case letters are used for un-aspirated consonants and short vowels while the capital case letters are used for aspirated consonants and long vowels. While the retroflexed voiceless and voiced consonants are mapped to 't, T, d and D', the dentals are mapped to 'w, W, x and X'. Hence the name of the scheme "WX", referring to the idiosyncratic mapping. Ubuntu Linux provides a keyboard support for WX notation.

Ubuntu Hindi (WX) keyboard layout
Ubuntu Hindi (WX) keyboard layout

In the following tables, such idiosynratic assignment of letters to phonemes with which they are normally not associated are boldfaced. Besides 'w', 'W', 'x', and 'X', these are 'f', 'F', 'q', 'Q', 'L', and 'R'.

Vowels

aAiIuUeEoO

Sonorants

qQL

Anusvāra and visarga

MH

The Anunasika is represented by 'z'. For example, अँ = az. In Sanskrit, the Avagraha is represented by 'Z'. For example, वमतोऽन्तः = vamawoZnwaH. This may cause confusion as 'Z' is also used for another purpose in the case of other Indic languages (see below, last paragraph).

Consonants

क्ख्ग्घ्ङ्Velar
kKgGf
च्छ्ज्झ्ञ्Palatal
cCjJF
ट्ठ्ड्ढ्ण्Retroflex
tTdDN
त्थ्द्ध्न्Dental
wWxXn
प्फ्ब्भ्म्Labial
pPbBm
य्र्ल्व्Semi-vowel
yrlv
श्ष्स्ह्Fricative
SRsh

This scheme was further extended to represent all the Indian scripts derived from Brahmi. To account for the characters from other Indian languages that are missing in Devanagari, three operators are used: 'Y' to get the next ISCII character, 'V' to get the previous ISCII character and 'Z' to add the nukta. Thus for example, 'l' represents ल (U0932) of Devanagari, and 'lY' represents ळ (U0933) in Marathi. 'e' represents ए (U090F) of Devanagari or ఏ (U0C0F) of Telugu and eV represents ऎ (U090E) or ఎ (U0C0E) of Telugu. Similarly 'ka' represents क of Devanagari, and 'kZa' represents क़.

See also


References

  1. Akshar Bharati; Vineet Chaitanya; Rajeev Sangal (1996). "Appendix B". Natural Language Processing: A Paninian Perspective (PDF). Prentice-Hall of India. pp. 191–193. ISBN 9788120309210. Retrieved 16 February 2014.
  2. {{Sanskrit Computational Linguistics First and Second International Symposia Rocquencourt, France, October 29-31, 2007 Providence, RI, USA, May 15-17, 2008, Revised Selected Papers Editors: Huet, Gérard, Kulkarni, Amba, Scharf, Peter (Eds.) | url=https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783642001543 ; refer to Appendix B}}

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