Why Sandhi?
This is not a post about the necessity of sandhi or even the historical/linguistic origin of it, which would be an interesting topic, though beyond me. After creating the Sandhi page on this site, the question arose for me as to why we write the term as “sandhi” in English. This appears to be the most common European1 convention for the term and seems to be a phonetic rendering. Perhaps that the answer as to why. However, the actual Devanāgarī is: संधि, which would make the “true” transliteration saṃdhi (according to IAST) or saṁdhi (according to ISO 15919).2 Can we consider “sandhi” a loan-word, that is rendered phonetically rather than transliterated? Is this also the case with “sangha” (संघ)?
1By “European” I mean English, Germanic, and Romance languages. I have no idea how other non-Indic Asian languages, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, nor Semetic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew, (to mention just a couple of other language groups) render the term.
2Apparently, there are two common transliteration systems for Sanskrit. The “unofficial” one is the scholarly convention that developed out of the likes of Monier-Williams and other Sanskrit geniuses, this is known as the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration or IAST. It is commonly used by academic scholars, is relatively simple and intuitive. Through IAST one can unambiguously represent Sanskrit characters in Latin script. However, the technical standard for transliterating Devanāgarī is known as ISO 15919. This was put out by the International Standards Organization in 2001 and accounts for ambiguity that can occur in a single document where different Indo-European scripts are represented. It is a more rigorous and logical system in some ways, but doesn’t yet seem to have been adopted wholesale by the scholarly community.