User talk:Alastair Haines/Indic studies

Many people want to know more about India. Any Indian person knows a lot about India. Please tell us what you know...
 * The need
 * The source
 * The solution
 * whoever you are
 * whether you think your English is good or bad.
 * Just do it!

Wiki is a team. You help us with knowledge, we can help you with English. Even native English speakers need help with their own language! But there is even more good news. The best English is simple English. Simple English is easy for everyone to read, even native English speakers. Also, people from all over the world read English Wiki. For some of these people, English is not their best language. Simple English makes a lot of people happy! Use popular words, simple tenses and short sentences. Write one simple idea, then another simple idea. Put them in time order, or in logical order.
 * Tips
 * Do write: A puri is an Indian bread, cooked in ghee.
 * Don't write: A puri is a delectable foodstuff, originating in the subcontinent.
 * Do write: The British arrested Gandhi and sent him to jail for six years. After two years he needed to go to hospital. When he was healthy again, the British let him leave jail early.
 * Don't write: Although having been arrested and sentenced to six years, Gandhi was later released, having recovered from a serious illness incurred in the second year, despite not yet being near completion of the years his full sentence would have required.

Names
There are many things that are special to India and only Indian languages have words for them. The most obvious examples are names: Gandhi, Indira, Mumbai, Bhima, Brahma, Shudra, Tamil, Jain, Kartik. In most cases, English doesn't think of names as having a "language", they are just names. If you want to write an Indian name in an article, just do it! English does "smooth" some names from other languages to sound more "English", and English spelling is crazy. If you can find the English spelling for an Indian name in a book, that will probably save someone else time. If you can't, just guess, someone else will find the normal spelling.

IAST
The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) gives us a very useful way to write Indian names. It is the easiest way for people who know Indian languages, because they can spell it perfectly. English-only readers will be able to guess how a name spelled with IAST sounds. IAST is not really ordinary English though, so someone might change it into an ordinary English name. But the important thing is, you don't have to! IAST is enough information for the team to work with. If you can change Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukh, Kannada, Malayalam or Tamil into IAST, others can change it into English.