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KRISHNA or KRSNA: Which is better??? Is there a subtle difference???

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I would say Krishna is better although I am long habituated to Krsna. When mentioning krsna on a forum not frequented by those familar I make a point of using Krishna. Afterall the thing is to make the Holy Name as easy to pronounce as possible so the reader may more easily benefit.

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Recently, I was typing out a post here and spelled Krishna as Krsna, a habit I've picked up on AF.

 

My wife was looking over my shoulder and asked "is that the way really hip, in-the-know devotees spell Krishna?"

 

Thinking about it, the easiest-to-pronounce spelling is the best, as the Names are for all.

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I became attached to seeing Krsna's name in Srila Prabhupada's Bhagavad-gita. Without the dots it looks like Krsna. I guess for me somehow it is more intimate. I fear it may have been I who started the Krsna movement way back in the early net nineties. In the seventies I had it that way on my motorcycle helmet. Yet on my car it was KRISHNA in gold letters - Bhagavan das Maharaja quite liked it.

 

And yes, the outsiders will say Krishna, not that that is not wonderful too. Like everyone else, when my listeners are outsiders I will write Krishna. Still, it sounds and looks better to me as Krsna.

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Ancient, Hebrew, from what I understand, was written without vowels. Today, some dots above (or is it below) the Hebrew are used to indicate vowels (from what I hear).

 

One consequence of this is that "Yahweh" is a best guess pronounciation of "YHVH" or "YHWH".

 

Without the diacritic marks, KRSNA simply makes no sense (since it could be pronounced at least 10 different ways in Sanskrit, "kirzna", "krizna", "kirshna", "kirshna" (with a palatal "sh"), "krishna", "krishna" (with a palatal "sh"), "krishnaah" (long a), etc.).

 

In my arrogant opinion, if there aren't diacritics, it ought to be "Krishna".

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Well, there is a subtle difference. Actually there is no 'i' sound in Kṛṣṇa. In Sanskrit the 'ṛ' sound (which actually should be rolled, as opposed to the 'r' sound which is not) is considered a vowel. IMHO there has been too much Anglicization of Indic names and words already. My online work and website try to standardize on the correct spellings using the IAST (International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration) system to render Sanskrit and other Indic languages (Hindi, Bengali) in Roman characters. For more information, see the Wikipedia article on IAST, which includes links to help pages showing how to enable Indic scripts on your computer. IAST-encoded text can be entered into your computer using freely available utilities and does not require any special fonts or settings to view. So we can spell Kṛṣṇa and other Sanskrit words and names correctly and get people used to seeing them without semantic information loss from incorrect linguistic interpolation.

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