Vedic Indian skyculture: Better English transliteration of native names

[vishvAs vAsuki]

Vedic Indian skyculture names celestial objects in the sanskrit language, and these same names are generally (but not always) used in various regional languages, with minor pronunciation variations. Currently, the transliterated names (eg: Dhrub Tara) provided in files such as http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~stellarium/stellarium/trunk/view/head:/skycultures/indian/star_names.fab show the bengali regional rendering of the original sanskrit names, with an inconsistent transliteration system. This is at odds with the expectation of users from other regions.

While this is a great start by the original contributor (shrI tanmoy), it can be improved by using the original, more widely recognized, sanskrit names using a standard IAST transliteration system (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari_transliteration ).

With your approval, I will gladly provide such transliterations in modified files. Please let me know.

[Alexander Wolf (alexwolf)]

Please update the Indian vedic skyculture and propose patch for us.

[vishvAs vAsuki (vvasuki)]

Alas, stellarium does not support accented roman characters (part of UTF8) used with IAST (http://i.imgur.com/RLEwheO.png from the 3rd and 4th commits in https://github.com/sanskrit-coders/stellarium/tree/patch-1/skycultures/indian ). Given this, switching over to a faithful phonetic rendering (with the intuitive OPTITRANS schema - https://sites.google.com/site/sanskritcode/optitrans#TOC-History ) seems the way to go. Do you agree, @alexwolf?

[vishvAs vAsuki (vvasuki)]

(PS: I'm not sure why git is not showing the file contents in utf-8 encoding. My local files look like - https://pastebin.com/h6JfRi7W )

[Alexander Wolf (alexwolf)]

Stellarium is support UTF8 encoding for .fab files - could you check encoding of file and show a name of text editor, what you are using?

Plus one important note: the second column should contains native name of constellation and third column - english name of this constellation.

[vishvAs vAsuki (vvasuki)]

Thanks! I've fixed the file encoding problem (was using Intellij). Everything looks good, except for śrāvaṇa - http://imgur.com/a/QPeWB - I don't know where the text with ? is coming from. I've sent https://github.com/Stellarium/stellarium/pull/3 .

Regarding " the second column should contains native name of constellation and third column - english name of this constellation" - I've switched to western names where possible, but the original seemed better in that it would satisfy this request - https://groups.google.com/d/msg/sanskrit-programmers/btt7Cz1BM2U/V3XljDWGBAAJ .

[Alexander Wolf (alexwolf)]

Please read the Chapter 9 of Stellarium User Guide.

[vishvAs vAsuki (vvasuki)]

namaste alex, http://www.stellarium.org/wiki/index.php/Creating_a_Script_for_Stellarium was what I got. But I did not understand why you pointed to it - is the pull request all right?

Regarding the "but the original seemed better in that it would satisfy this request - https://groups.google.com/d/msg/sanskrit-programmers/btt7Cz1BM2U/V3XljDWGBAAJ " part of in my previous message, I later realized that the current setup satisfies it anyway.

[Alexander Wolf (alexwolf)]

I'm sorry, but you read outdated version of User Guide (see right top corner: Information is actual for version 0.13.1)

Please use last version: https://launchpad.net/stellarium/0.16/0.16.0/+download/stellarium_user_guide-0.16.0-1.pdf

[vishvAs vAsuki (vvasuki)]

Ah - got it! Fixed the files to conform and it makes much more sense - http://imgur.com/a/V0VWr . Please take another look.

[Alexander Wolf (alexwolf)]

OK, it looks good for me now

[Alexander Wolf (alexwolf)]

I have a question for star_names.fab data - is it really correct transliteration? Could you add a comments for translators?

[vishvAs vAsuki (vvasuki)]

I checked the transliteration again, and it looked fine except for a couple of missing accents (they can be checked at http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/scans/awork/apidev/sample/list-0.2.html by setting input to IAST). Added comments for translators.

[Tanmoy Saha (t4saha)]

https://code.launchpad.net/~t4saha/stellarium-skycultures/indianV2

[vishvAs vAsuki (vvasuki)]

namaste tanmoy! Thanks for the pointer, and for your pioneering work 🙏. I am far more comfortable with github than on launchpad, but I found my way to changes in http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~t4saha/stellarium-skycultures/indianV2/revision/95#indian/star_names.fab . There are several conflicts between those files and https://github.com/Stellarium/stellarium/pull/3/files . It would be good to resolve them and proceed further, so that duplicated effort can be avoided and the skyculture grows richer faster. I think we can do more together (I invited participation in this thread as well - https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sanskrit-programmers/btt7Cz1BM2U ). If you're comfortable with github, (once we discuss and agree on the way forward) would you care to join my repository and do the merge? I am currently focusing on adding grid lines along the yogatArA-s.

[Tanmoy Saha (t4saha)]

1.There is no mention of specific boundary co-ordinates of constellations in any authentic Vedic scripts or any papers, except that the ecliptic is divided into 27 equal parts of 13deg20". As such boundary or gridline implementation may not be correct.
2.nakshatra's are more like asterisms. Changing them into that category we can separately view them from Constellations (rashi) with different colors or the other way.
3. We can not expect to use this ancient data to observe modern things and modifying to match current observations or astrological things makes it non-vedic and may end up with a alternative Indian sky culture.

[vishvAs vAsuki (vvasuki)]

namaste tanmoy -

[1] I'll address the first point in https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1710443 , since it is directly relevant there. Shortly, you're mistaken.

Agree with [2]. I was not aware of stellarium support for this separate category. Using it to separate raashi-s and naxatra-s is indeed a good idea - if one can still keep boundaries.

@alex - are the last 2 fields in `3 18 66.82 1.9 20.80803147 6 -66.82 2 N27 N01` of any significance at all? Can they correspond to asterisms?

[3] I don't understand this statement at all. To the extant I can guess, you seem to mean identification and naming of naxatra-s by the term "ancient data", and imply that current observations are not relevant to practicing the vedic tradition. If so, as a practicing gRhya ritualist (who has therefore read the gRhya-sUtra-s) who has some basic familiarity with shrauta-rituals (having witnessed some of them), and who has studied the vyAkaraNa and Chandas vedaanga-s in the traditional setting, I can confidently say that this assertion is wrong. For example, most of the entire class of Apastamba ritualists did not observe the commencement of veda study during the last full moon due to the lunar eclipse (a current observation). One can further quote many sUtra-s from the gRhya, shrauta and even vyAkaraNa-s corpora which clearly motivate observations. Same with temple rituals. Even more, one can refer to this series of articles - http://indiafacts.org/vedic-system-of-chronology/ , http://indiafacts.org/of-vedic-system/ to see how current observations are essential to correct practice of vedic traditions. One can for that matter even question what motivated this committee https://archive.org/stream/HistoryOfCalendarPanchangaCommittee/History-of-Calendar-Panchanga-Committee#page/n41/mode/1up set up by the Indian government.

If despite this, you're uncomfortable with where we're headed, I'm fine with forking and having different sky-cultures. FWIW, I agree that we'll eventually end up with multiple Indian skycultures because there is clear drift and difference - but that's when one can trace such differences solidly to traditions and texts.

PS: Responses starting tomorrow until next wednesday will be delayed as I'll be travelling to witness the total solar eclipse.

[Tanmoy Saha (t4saha)]

I know these boundary co-ordinates. But problem is that in this system some major stars or Yogtara and parts of nakshatra will lie outside their boundaries. To solve this if we unevenly distribute the boundary range (not 13 deg 20") then calculated data will not match with the observed data.

[vishvAs vAsuki (vvasuki)]

namaste tanmoy, Indeed it is true that a few of the yogatArA-s (going by their mainstream identification) will lie outside their boundaries - in which case, any resultant problem (with regards to ritual timing or astrology) should be solved by other means (some people propose alternate identifications for such yogatArA-s). But in most of the cases, no such problem arises. In either case, careful practitioners of the tradition do not give up on current observations.

[Tanmoy Saha (t4saha)]

Yes and that will create more confusion for most of the general users. That's why I think boundary implementation should be avoided but transliteration is very good idea. Pro user can implement this for their own use. We may provide a link in description to download the boundary.dat file but in default package it should not be included.

[Tanmoy Saha (t4saha)]

I also created the boundary in first time but when I show some of my friends who uses stellarium regularly basis their opinion was it was confusing.

[Tanmoy Saha (t4saha)]

https://code.launchpad.net/~t4saha/stellarium-skycultures/indianV2

Found my old boundary.dat file and attached to the branch.
https://code.launchpad.net/~t4saha/stellarium-skycultures/indianV2boundary

[vishvAs vAsuki (vvasuki)]

namaste tanmoy, thanks for the comments - I will address them in https://bugs.launchpad.net/stellarium/+bug/1710443 . We should broadly stick to the subject of this thread here. Back to that topic: Can we solve the inconsistency between your branch and my pull request? We could use the following principles:
* Use standard Sanskrit words (with perfectly the right syllables)
* Use IAST for devanAgarI transliteration.
* Use the most direct English translation, following the standard entries in the vAchaspatyam and kalpadruma sanskrit-to-sanskrit dictionaries which provide native etymology.

[Tanmoy Saha (t4saha)]

Yes names are used accordingly IAST.
I am not very use to with Sanskrit.
I get help from one of my school old teacher and friends for right syllables and meanings. I don't know which dictionary they used.
You may Update if there is any irregularity with syllables and meanings.

[vishvAs vAsuki (vvasuki)]

Thanks for clarifying, @tanmoy. @alexwolf, I think we have agreement here. This particular thread can be closed by accepting https://github.com/Stellarium/stellarium/pull/3/files . It should also take care of https://bugs.launchpad.net/stellarium/+bug/1710443 (I've for now copied tanmoy's boundaries - cross-checking will take more time).

[vishvAs vAsuki (vvasuki)]

I received the following notification:
"
** Branch linked: lp:~t4saha/stellarium-skycultures/indianV2

** Changed in: stellarium
     Assignee: vishvAs vAsuki (vvasuki) => Tanmoy Saha (t4saha)

** Changed in: stellarium
     Assignee: Tanmoy Saha (t4saha) => (unassigned)
"

I am confused by what the above means with regards to my pull request and this bug.