WX notation is a

transliteration Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus ''trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → , Cyrillic → , Greek → the digraph , Armenian → or L ...

scheme for representing Indian languages in

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

. This scheme originated at

IIT Kanpur The Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT Kanpur) Hindi: भारतीय प्रौद्योगिकी संस्थान कानपुर) is a public institute of technology located in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India. It was ...

for computational processing of Indian languages, and is widely used among the

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to proc ...

(NLP) community in India. The notation (though unidentified) is used, for example, in a textbook on NLP from IIT Kanpur. The salient features of this transliteration scheme are: Every consonant and every vowel has a single mapping into Roman. Hence it is a prefix code, advantageous from a computation point of view. Typically the small case letters are used for un-aspirated consonants and short vowels while the capital case letters are used for aspirated consonants and long vowels. While the retroflexed voiceless and voiced consonants are mapped to 't, T, d and D', the dentals are mapped to 'w, W, x and X'. Hence the name of the scheme "WX", referring to the idiosyncratic mapping. Ubuntu Linux provides a keyboard support for WX notation.

Vowels

Sonorants

Anusvāra and visarga

The Anunasika is represented by 'z'. For example, अँ = az. In Sanskrit, the

Avagraha Avagraha () is a symbol used to indicate prodelision of an ''()'' in many Indian languages like Sanskrit as shown below. It is usually transliterated with an apostrophe in Roman script and, in case of Devanagari, as in the Sanskrit philosophical ...

is represented by 'Z'. For example, वमतोऽन्तः = vamawoZnwaH. This may cause confusion as 'Z' is also used for another purpose in the case of other Indic languages (see below, last paragraph).

Consonants

This scheme was further extended to represent all the Indian scripts derived from Brahmi. To account for the characters from other Indian languages that are missing in Devanagari, three operators are used: 'Y' to get the next

ISCII Indian Script Code for Information Interchange (ISCII) is a coding scheme for representing various writing systems of India. It encodes the main Indic scripts and a Roman transliteration. The supported scripts are: Bengali–Assamese, Devanagar ...

character, 'V' to get the previous ISCII character and 'Z' to add the

nukta ় The nuqta (Hindi–Urdu: //, fa, , noqte; from ar, نقطة, nuqṭa, dot; sometimes also spelled nukta) is a diacritic mark that was introduced in Devanagari and some other Indic scripts to represent sounds not present in the original scrip ...

. Thus for example, 'l' represents ल (U0932) of Devanagari, and 'lY' represents ळ (U0933) in Marathi. 'e' represents ए (U090F) of Devanagari or ఏ (U0C0F) of Telugu and eV represents ऎ (U090E) or ఎ (U0C0E) of Telugu. Similarly 'ka' represents क of Devanagari, and 'kZa' represents क़.

References

{{Reflist

External links