Vava and the Limits of Romanisation

The pair of sounds Vava covers is a good place to state plainly what a romanised Punjabi can and cannot do. A romanisation is a mapping from one writing system to another, and it can only preserve distinctions that both systems make. Where Gurmukhi distinguishes retroflex from dental and the Latin alphabet does not, the mapping needs a diacritic or it loses eight letters into four. Where Punjabi makes no distinction between v and w and English makes one, the mapping has to invent a choice, and different transliteration schemes make it differently. Where Punjabi has tone and writes it with consonant letters, a romanisation that transcribes sounds rather than letters will produce something a Punjabi reader cannot map back to the spelling.

None of this is an argument against romanisation, which is necessary for indexes, catalogues, place names and any reference work with a mixed readership, but it is an argument for saying which scheme is in use and for keeping the original script alongside it wherever the exact letter matters. The atlas holds the Gurmukhi character for every letter as well as a romanised display name, so that nothing depends on the transliteration being reversible. The same principle applies to the display of the letters themselves. A romanised name is a label for a reader who does not know the script; the letter is the thing the label names, and only one of the two is authoritative.