2012/2/18 Shriramana Sharma <[email protected]>: >> Thanks for all this info. A final question - why use "LLLA" instead of >> ZHA? > Actually, in what way is "ZHA" better? Anyhow, I think they just named it > based on the Latin transliteration. So l ḷ ḻ got named as LA LLA LLLA.
There are multiple romanizations. The one you cite is the mot academic one, with the intent of being bijectively reversible without ambiguity, but it is the hardest to decipher, and even more difficult thant the original script. Consider the various romanizations of Cyrillic, and then how the ISO 9 standard evolved: the academic romanizations has been abandonned in ISO 9, for something that is now much more workable (and is now effectively used ni languages written either in Cyrillic or Latin; this means that the two orthographies are not automatically convertible without a dictionnary lookup in some direction for many exceptions ; and thus, that those orthographies are now separated, as if these were separate languages, even though this separation is still only in their written form but not in their aural form). Now for LLLA, the same will apply, and a digraph "zh" will be enormously better than the "scientific" trigraph "lḷḻ" which is almost impossible to read distinctly, and very inconvenient to type, even if the reverse conversion from the Latin "zh" digraph to the Indic script may be ambiguous. And may be sometime there will be an academy that will opt for replacing those ugly multigraphs by a new single Latin character (consider what is happening now in Macedonian since the independance of the FYROM, with the intended attempt caused by an ongoing orthographic reform to escape from the Serbian model to a model more similar to Bulgarian ; this is a similar situation, even though it occurs only within the *same* unified Cyrillic script; the history of ISO 9 versions is very instructive about what could happen to those romanizations systems, even those that have been the subject of an international standard).
