Punctuation: Sanskrit and Hyphen Loss

As my academic interests are centred mainly on Ancient Indian religious philosophy, being able to read transliterated Sanskrit has been helpful. So here’s a brief guide. With my linguistic interests, this especially interests me.

            A mark above a vowel just means it’s a variation of that sound, so for example ‘nāga’ is pronounced ‘nah-gu’.

Any S with a mark (such as a line above or a dot below) is pronounced as ‘sh’.

If an R has a dot beneath it, it is read as ‘ree’. For example, ‘Rg Veda’ is ‘Rig Veda’.

Thus ‘Krsna’ (dot under each) is ‘Krishna’.

            This is particularly useful because Sanskrit is sometimes written as ‘Samskrt’. Marks on Ms are to be read as N. This is seen in ‘Samkara’ for Shankara, too (a major philosopher).

When two words are hyphenated, they will in time lose the hyphen. An example is ‘today’ which was 'to-day' as late as the early 1900s.

            Two hyphenated words that I use, ‘cross-stitch’ and ‘cliff-face’ are interesting, in that their unhyphenated forms would have three of the same letter in a row (‘crossstich’ and ‘cliffface’). There is no example in the English language where there are three of the same letters in a row.

So what would happen? Would they be left like that? Would one of the three same letters be dropped out naturally? In Germany, the body that regulates words will often announce that specific words have lost a letter for the specific purpose of making sure there are no three of the same letters together in one word.

            I’m interested to see what would happen.