Everyone please read and respond !

[Giri]

On Mon, 12 Aug 1996, Ken Stuart wrote:

> I was just wondering if there were two different words:
>
> maya and mAya
>
> If not, then is it acceptable to everyone to not capitalize letters in
> the middle of words?   I presume that the point of the capitalization
> has to do with pronunciation, but I am not speaking the words, I am
> reading them and it is a LOT harder to read with the capitalization in
> the middle of words.

        While maya is same whether it is spelled mAyA or maayaa, there
are many words which change meaning. For example, kala and kAla.
Personally, many volunteers who contribute to the sanskrit documents have
written to me that they prefer kaala instead of writing kAla, not because
it is difficult to read but because it is difficult to type. Few others
say that A is more easier to type than aa ..
        Besides these, there are obvious problems in sandhi. For example
if you join a word ending in a with a word start in a, it is imperative
that the new word has aa or you could change its meaning. There are
a couple of sanskrit scholars on this mailing list (aikya: that's you :-)),
who can provide better examples.
        Personally I prefer to read a scholarly document which follows a
not too difficult transliteration scheme (like Vidya's home page) because
I can immediately associate the word to the actual word in devangari
script. But I guess this is a personal choice because of my background.
The reason I don't use transliteration every time is because I am lazy :-)

Giri