Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> INDIC INTERTRANSLITERATABILITY IS IN FACT A DESIDERATUM, BECAUSE
> SANSKRIT CAN BE WRITTEN IN ANY LOCAL SCRIPT AT ALL (EVEN THOUGH THESE
> DAYS, THANKS TO THE BRITS, YOU USUALLY ONLY SEE IT IN DEVANAGARI.

That's interesting. I studied Sanskrit briefly, in Devanagari of
course, and twenty years later was startled to learn how young D. is.

I can see how it happened: foreign scholars naturally adopted a single
script, likely but not necessarily the most widespread Indic script, as
the standard for writing Sanskrit - and then got Indians to go along
with it as part of the complex represented by the English language.

You say Sanskrit "can" be written in any local script. But was it? If
a Tamil wrote a letter to a Bengali, say, in Sanskrit, did he expect the
Bengali to read the Tamil script, or were some scripts preferred for
such uses?

(reminds me somehow that I've seen, somewhere, a picture of a letter to
a duke of Burgundy, in Mongolian script)

--
Anton Sherwood, http://www.ogre.nu/
"How'd ya like to climb this high *without* no mountain?" --Porky Pine