Yeah used to be a pet peeve of mine, we have lot of Bhajans here at Ammachi Satsang and the older Bhajan books had poor transliteration causing Westerners lot of grief.
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, cardemaister <no_reply@...> wrote: > > Quite often one sees Sanskrit long vowels ignored by > people who are not familiar with that language. That's > also done in the case of "substandard" Roman transliteration > of devanaagarii texts. > > One widespread example is 'samadhi' for 'samaadhi (or some > other "trick" to indicate the length of the second 'a', > like A, a:, รก, a.[?], a_ ....)'. > That's not a big deal until someone having haphazard > knowledge of Sanskrit starts to interpret > the meaning of that word on the basis of the "misspelling". > > That's a *bit* like someone not knowing English and the > history of rock music almost at all, sees a word like > 'Jagger' in some text, preferably as the first word > of a sentence. They start looking for the word in > a dictionary. The word most resembling 'jagger' prolly > is 'jaeger'. So, they conclude perhaps there's a typo > there, and that text actually is about hunting, or stuff! LoL! > > http://translate.google.com/#en|de|jaeger >
