To persons used to seeing Tamil proper names romanized as they commonly are in English, the name forms used in this catalog may appear strange. They are in the Library of Congress (LC) romanization. This note will explain a little about this romanization and LC's use of names, to help users find authors and other names they are searching for. It should be noted that in all the examples, diacritics are omitted, just as they are currently in the catalog. Diacritics are an essential part of the LC romanization, but they are largely irrelevant to searching in this and other systems.

The Library of Congress romanization is a variant of that used in the Tamil Lexicon published by the University of Madras. One roman letter with its diacritics, if any, always represents a single Tamil letter, regardless of pronunciation. Thus the roman character c represents a Tamil letter that may be pronounced as s, ch, or j in different words, and likewise the roman letter k stands for a character that may be k, h, or g.

The Library of Congress also has a policy of using only one name for an author. This is called the "established form." Other possible forms are cross-referenced. Unfortunately, this catalog does not have cross references (in future these will be available), so you must use LC's established form. One way to find this entry form is to look up the author in your library's catalog, if you are at an American institution. Otherwise, try different forms of the name. Since RMRL has not completed cataloging, it is possible that variant forms might be used for a single author.

Example: Bharati, Shuddhananda, is the established form of an author. Variant entries might include: Shuddhananda Bharati; Cuttananta Parati; Bharati, Suddhananda; and so forth.

Some principles: If an author has written only in Tamil, the romanized form of his Tamil name is likely to be used. If a person is already well known in the English-speaking world by one form, that form will be used (e.g., Rajagopalachari, C. (Chakravarty)). LC rules call for using the last element in a name as if it were a surname, with few exceptions.

Below are some examples where the commonly used English spellings of names differ from LC romanization. Even though the straight romanized form may not be the established form, it may still appear in titles, e.g. Makatma Kanti, where the established form is Gandhi, Mahatma, 1969-1948. ("*" indicates LC established form.)

The romanization table below consists of three columns: (1) Tamil character; (2) the Library of Congress (LC) romanization with notes indicating diacritics; (3) the romanization used in this Roja Muthiah Research Library (RMRL) catalog. It will be seen that the RMRL romanization is simply the LC romanization without the diacritics. Although the diacritics are included in the bibliographic records, it is not possible to display them now. In this catalog, as in most library systems, the diacritics are irrelevant in searching. The sequence of characters is the standard one found in most Tamil dictionaries; the grantha characters used for Indo-Aryan loanwods are at the end of the sequence.

Tamil Character	LC Romanizatio	RMRL Character
	a	a
	macron a	a
	i	i
	macron i	i
	u	u
	macron u	u
	e	e
	macron e	e
	ai	ai
	o	o
	macron o	o
	au	au

Tamil Character	LC Romanization	RMRL Character
	underscore ka	ka
	ka	ka
	dot above na	na
	ca	ca
	tilde na	na
	dot below ta	ta
	dot below na	na
	ta	ta
	na	na
	pa	pa
	ma	ma
	ya	ya
	ra	ra
	la	la
	va	va
	underscore la	la
	dot below la	la
	underscore ra	ra
	underscore na	na

Tamil Character	LC Romanization	RMRL Character
	ja	ja
	acute sa	sa
	dot below sa	sa
	sa	sa
	ha	ha

This table was drawn from ALA-LC romanization tables: transliteration schemes for non-roman scripts, compiled and edited by Randall K. Barry. Washington: Library of Congress, 1991.