Latin small letter n with macron

mauro sacchetto

For a transliteration problem, I have to insert in a bibliography a text by Panikkar entitled:

The Vedic Experience. Veda Mantraman̄jarī.

Now, the lowercase <n> with the diacritic of macron does not exist in Unicode.

If I create the glyph, which is very fast in itself, obviously I have to create it in the PUA and the glyph lacks a unicode value.

At this point, how can I make it be recognized for example with LaTex and in any case by editors?

Thomas Phinney

You do not have to create it in PUA.

You make your glyph, leave it unencoded, and name it as a ligature of /n + /uni0304 (the combining macron): "n_uni0304". Probably you ought to have /uni0304 in the font as well.

Then set that up in 'ccmp' and you should be good, I think.

You'll either need to copy/paste the character sequence, or have a keyboard that allows you to type a combining macron (or Unicode directly). But you were going to have that sort of issue with your PUA assignment as well.

Kent Lew

What transliteration system are you using? I think the more conventional transliteration is Veda Mantramañjarī.

Georg Seifert

Or just type n + macroncomb and rely on mark positioning.

Theunis de Jong

LaTeX uses its own system for accents. The typesetting engine can move any accent into place above just about any character: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/163716/how-to-write-accents-in-latex

[Originally, TeX was limited to its own character set and all accented letters were defined like this. I cannot hazard a guess what happens with modern fonts. Surely it uses composite characters when available – but in your case it cannot, because there is no Unicode codepoint to use. However, OpenType support has been successfully incorporated years ago. No way to tell without trying; it might not be a problem after all.]

That said, Thomas' solution should work for all other word processors, even if it does not understand OpenType ligatures. In that case, the combining macron will be placed above the preceding character like any other combining accent – not nicely, but still understandably.

notdef

Fallback behaviour is, btw, why combining marks are positioned to center on a preceding medium-width vowel.

mauro sacchetto

Perfectly successful operation following the instructions of @ThomasPhinney.
I take this opportunity to thank the members of this forum, their availability and competition. I'm learning a lot about fonts from them!

PS

In reality, in publishing (at least in the Italian one) there is a considerable uncertainty, because for this title I found transliterations with 2 macrons, 2 circumflexes, a macron and a circumflex ...

Kent Lew

I was mostly going by the book cover:

André G. Isaak

A quick Google Search reveals 2 hits for Mantraman̄jarī and 602 hits for Mantramañjarī (and only 1 hit for Mantramaṅjarī which would have been my choice).

Kent Lew

André — I think sandhi would require that a preceding nasal be pulled to the same position, that’s why I would think the palatal ñ rather than guttural ṅ. Identifying the original Devanāgarī would clear things up, of course. ;-)

Kent Lew

But if Mauro’s editor wants n̄, then that’s what he has to deliver, of course. ;-)

John Hudson

Identifying the original Devanāgarī would clear things up, of course.

Modern orthography is मन्त्र मंजरी, I think. I've not found any other reasonable variations on that spelling. The romanised mantramañjarī as one word seems to be unique to the title of this book.

André G. Isaak

Kent Lew said:

André — I think sandhi would require that a preceding nasal be pulled to the same position, that’s why I would think the palatal ñ rather than guttural ṅ

Oops. A senior moment. You are, of course correct. I was simply mentally flipping the use of some diacritics.

Kent Lew

John — I suspect the title is meant as a tatpuruṣa compound: मन्त्रमञ्जरी.

John Hudson

Yes, but I wonder if it is a compound invented for the title of this English-language book, rather than something occurring in Sanskrit texts?

Kent Lew

FWIW, there is precedent for -mañjari being used by the Sanskrit poet Kṣemendra for various verse collections of stories abridged from longer epics — e.g. Ramāyaṇamañjari, Bhāratamañjari.

Perhaps that is the intent for this Vedic anthology as well. (Although I’m not sure the significance of the lengthening of the ī — feminine? dual case?)

Michel Boyer

In the Hindi version of the Wiki on Ksemendra the i is long. For more information on the word, I found https://www.wisdomlib.org/definition/manjari

mauro sacchetto

The main Italian translation (Rizzoli, Milan) has 2 circumflexes. Another publisher (Servitium, Milan) has first a circumflex, then a line below (long?). A last case I saw <n> too has a line below.
Unfortunately I don't know anything about Indian, so I can't personally evaluate the reliability of the transliteration. No publisher requires me one solution or another: I'm just trying to adopt the most correct one.

Thank you for your considerations, now I see that I orient myself

Michel Boyer

Another publisher (Servitium, Milan) has first a circumflex, then a line below (long?).

Where did you see that? Here is a grab from a book by Servitium

mauro sacchetto

It seems to me first a circumflex (over <n>), then a line below (long?) over <i>

Michel Boyer

Over the n, I see a tilde,  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilde.
Over the i, I must confess that the line looks a bit too long to my taste indeed but I am no sanskritist.

John Hudson

Yes, tilde on the n, indicating nasalisation, and macron on the i, indicating a long vowel: Mantramañjarī.