Hi Dennis,

>
>We have three systems here:
>1. Romanised pali with diacriticals (simply Romanised pali?)
>2. Romanised pali using the Velthuis system

Velthuis is actually a subset of diacritics. It's
just a way of representing the diacritics using
normal characters available on a keyboard.

Another way of representing the diacritics is the
Harvard-Kyoto system. See my 'favorite quote' in
my profile for the Pali alphabet in HK.

>3. Romanised pali without diacriticals
>
>Is there a term to distinguish Romanised pali with diacriticals from
>one without diacriticals?

I don't know about a term for it, but the
difference has to do with application. Words
without the diacritics are basically being
naturalized into English as Buddhist technical
terms. karma/kamma, dharma/dharma are examples of
these words that have crossed over into English.
People who read Buddhist literature and go to
meditation retreats have probably learned many
more.

For serious study of Pali, however, it is
absolutely necessary to use the diacritics. There
is no way to abandon them. They will certainly
not be abandoned in Pali dictionaries.

>
>I am thinking about this issue in relation to creating keywords for a
>wiki. The current practice is to use Romanised pali without
>diacriticals. Are there many instances where two common pali
>terms/concepts use the same word without diacriticals? Looking at the
>PTS dictionary, there will be many similar non-diacriticals pali words.
>
>What do you suggest?

If your Wiki keywords are just meant to cover a
set of, say 150 most important technical terms
from Pali, then I think abandoning the diacritics
is an okay way to go. You could include the term
in velthuis or HK in parentheses within the
article.

You will have to have the tilde-n however: ñ for
words like pañña and suññata. These cannot be
represented satisfactorily with panna and sunnata
IMO. Note however, the sanskrit forms work
decently without diacritics: prajna, sunyata. You
might consider using the sanskrit versions of
terms for this sort of case if you don't want to
use the tilde.

Within that restricted vocabulary, there may be a
small number of potential confusions, however
such as:

baala /bala which both would appear as bala
without diacritics. The former means 'fool' and
the latter 'power/strength'.

Another is maalaa / mala 'garland' and 'filth'
respectively. There might be a few more.

For the most part however, the commonest
technical terms connected with Buddhism and
meditation can be rendered in naturalized English
forms without diacritics without confusion.

best regards,

/Rett