New visitors sometimes write in to ask why the site spells it Tāḍāsana and not Tadasana, or prāṇāyāma instead of pranayama. The dots and lines look fussy. They are not decoration, they are pronunciation instructions, and dropping them quietly changes the words.
What the marks do
- The macron (ā, ī, ū) doubles a vowel’s length. Tāḍāsana has four long syllables; saying “ta-DA-sa-na” with a short first a is a different rhythm than the word owns.
- The dot under (ṭ, ḍ, ṇ, ṣ) means the tongue curls back to the roof of the mouth. English barely has these sounds; the dot is the difference between śāsana (teaching) and ṣaṣa (rabbit) territory.
- The ś vs ṣ distinction, the hiss with the tongue forward versus curled; is exactly the one Sanskrit grammarians named first among the sounds.
- The ṁ (anusvāra) is the resonant nose-hum in Oṁ, not an English “m” clipped short.
This system is called IAST (International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration), and it has been the scholarly standard for over a century, it is how the texts themselves are printed in the editions we cite.
Why it matters here
The mission of this site is to be source-first: when we tell you the Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā says sthira-sukham āsanam, we would like you to be able to sound it out exactly as a pandit would, not approximately as an airport signboard might. Every mantra on the site carries its full IAST transliteration for the same reason, a mantra is, among other things, a precise arrangement of sounds.
And when you just want to type it
We get it. Search boxes and URLs stay simple on purpose, /mind/pranayama/ is welcome to stay
dotless. Precision lives in the text; convenience lives in the address bar.