Palæography

In the manuscript descriptions, we try to transcribe text excerpts as accurately as possible. Since a number of ligatures appear in manuscripts that were never used in printed editions, we have developed a system of transliteration to represent them. This comes with the added benefit of being able to index all occurences of these ligatures as they appear in the catalogue records. Moreover, we have extended our typefaces with glyphs for each ligature, so that our transcriptions can visually represent scribal hands more accurately.

Tamil transliteration

Since our manuscript descriptions are created in TEI XML, we use XML tags to encode instances of special Tamil ligatures.

Below-base ligatures

See a list of all below-base ligatures in Tamil manuscripts, as recorded in the manuscript descriptions.

Post-base ligatures

See a list of all post-base ligatures in Tamil manuscripts, as recorded in the manuscript descriptions.

Sanskrit transliteration

Unlike Tamil, Sanskrit is written in dozens of different scripts. Each script has its own peculiarities.