APPROACH NOTE
While undertaking the task of preparing a Tamil-Konkani Vocabulary, our team faced several challenges, some of them unique to Konkani while some others unique to Tamil. It is essential and only logical that we apprise the readers upfront of what strategy we adopted in facing such challenges. This Note intends to elaborate the interim solutions that we have applied to resolve certain peculiars.
The process of transliterating Konkani words in Devanagari script into Tamil script brings about several problems owing to the lack of several equivalent characters in Tamil script to accommodate the sounds present in Konkani. Suitable conventions have been adopted in the transliteration process in order to assist the reader in getting the sounds right. This article deals with the problems associated the Tamil script in transliterating Konkani, emphasizing the need for a convention and finally ending with suitable remedial measures taken in this work which form the basis for the entire transliteration process of converting Konkani in Devanagari script to Konkani in Tamil script. The tack adopted here may be familiar to those people who have read Tamil transliterations of old Sanskrit texts. Further, some special problems are also introduced owing to the presence of certain sounds in Konkani, which cannot be represented by the Tamil script. In such cases also, suitable conventions have been adopted, which may not have been realised in Tamil transliterations of original Sanskrit texts chiefly owing to the fact that Sanskrit does not have such sounds in abundance when compared to Konkani.
PART 1: BASIC TRANSLITERATION CONVENTIONS ADOPTED
It should be noted that the conventions adopted herein are restricted solely to this book and are definitely not, by any means, a standard procedure in transliterating Konkani to Tamil. A question would automatically arise as to what is then, the standard procedure followed. The answer is that no such work has ever been attempted before, making this work one of a kind. The very purpose of introducing such conventions is to aid the reader in getting the right pronunciations. Although it has been mentioned above that such conventions are adopted in transliterating Sanskrit to Tamil script, conventions adopted here may vary from the method followed in Sanskrit-Tamil transliteration works. The approach used here is based on a logical numbering system.
