Separate transliteration vs pronunciation

[bhajneet]

Transliteration is a two way process. If you feed gurmukhi into a transliterator and then try to convert that back into gurmukhi it should match. 1 to 1. 0 loss of data.

I think today only our Hindi is close to actually being able to do this. And that's because all the characters of gurbani have a corresponding character in devanagri.

This is also possible in English using accented characters. If you start to use 2 letters for translit in english then you almost absolutely must provide a letter-separator char to interpret it programmatically.

I would argue that we change our functions for translit into functions for pronunciation outside of Hindi. This should be reflected in the desktop frontend as well.

If we want a true english translit, I would recommend to start off the basis of what Sikh RI have done.

And any translit which converts the one in ੴ to ਇਕ is not a transliteration at all. Same with the second character. These cannot be converted back programmatically and thus are not a true 1-1 transliteration.

A transliteration need not necessarily be easy to read for pronunciation's sake. Any loss of sihari aunkurh etc which may be used for grammatical rules is a failure of transliteration.