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The Bengali alphabet or the Bangla alphabet (Bengali: বাংলা হরফ Bangla hôrôf, Bengali: বাংলা লিপি Bangla lipi) is the writing system for the Bengali language (Bangla) and is the 6th most widely used writing system in the world. The script with minor variations is shared by Assamese and is the basis for the other languages like Meitei and Bishnupriya Manipuri. Historically, the script has also been used to write the Sanskrit language in the region of Bengal. From a classificatory point of view, the Bengali script is an abugida, i.e. its vowel graphemes are mainly realized not as independent letters, but as diacritics attached to its consonant letters. It is written from left to right and lacks distinct letter cases. It is recognizable by a distinctive horizontal line running along the tops of the letters that links them together which is known as মাত্রা matra. The Bengali script is however less blocky and presents a more sinuous shape.
The Bengali script evolved from the Siddhông script, which belongs to the Brahmic family of scripts. In addition to differences in how the letters are pronounced in the different languages, there are some typographical differences between the version of the script used for Assamese language and that used for Bengali language.
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The version of the script used for Manipuri language is also a different variation in that it uses the rô which is represented as র in Bengali script without the different representation as in Assamese script, but also uses the Assamese script character sounding wô represented as ৱ, which is absent in the Bengali script.
The Bengali script was originally not associated with any particular language, but was often used in the eastern regions of Medieval India and then in Pala Empire and later continued to be specifically used in the Bengal region. It was later standardized into the modern Bengali script by Ishwar Chandra under the reign of the British East India Company. Today the script holds official script status in Bangladesh and India, and is associated with the daily life of the Bengali people.
The Bengali script can be divided into vowel diacritics, consonant and vowel letters (including consonant conjuncts), modifiers, digits, and punctuation marks.
The Bengali script has a total of 11 vowel graphemes, each of which is called a স্বরবর্ণ sbôrôbôrnô "vowel letter". These sbôrôbôrnôs represent six of the seven main vowel sounds of Bengali, along with two vowel diphthongs. All of these are used in both Bengali and Assamese, the two main languages using the script.
The table below shows the vowels present in the modern (i.e., since late nineteenth century) inventory of the Bengali alphabet, which has abandoned three historical vowels, ৠ rri, ঌ li, and ৡ lli, traditionally placed between ঋ ri and এ e.
Consonant letters are called ব্যঞ্জনবর্ণ bênjônbôrnô "consonant letter" in Bengali. The names of these letters are typically just the consonant sound plus the inherent vowel অ ô. Since the inherent vowel is assumed and not written, most letters' names look identical to the letter itself (e.g. the name of the letter ঘ is itself ghô, not gh).
Up to four consecutive consonants not separated by vowels can be orthographically represented as a ligature called a "consonant conjunct" (Bengali: যুক্তাক্ষর juktakkhôr or যুক্তবর্ণ juktôbôrnô). Typically, the first consonant in the conjunct is shown above and/or to the left of the following consonants. Many consonants appear in an abbreviated or compressed form when serving as part of a conjunct. Others simply take exceptional forms in conjuncts, bearing little or no resemblance to the base character.
Often, consonant conjuncts are not actually pronounced as would be implied by the pronunciation of the individual components. For example, adding ল lô underneath শ shô in Bengali creates the conjunct শ্ল, which is not pronounced shlô but slô in Bengali. Many conjuncts represent Sanskrit sounds that were lost centuries before modern Bengali was ever spoken, as in জ্ঞ, which is a combination of জ jô and ঞ nô, but is not pronounced jnô, Instead, it is pronounced ggô in modern Bengali. Thus, as conjuncts often represent (combinations of) sounds that cannot be easily understood from the components, the following descriptions are concerned only with the construction of the conjunct, and not the resulting pronunciation.
Some consonants fuse in such a way that one stroke of the first consonant also serves as a stroke of the next.
Some consonants are simply written closer to one another to indicate that they are in a conjunct together.
Some consonants are compressed (and often simplified) when appearing as the first member of a conjunct.
Some consonants are abbreviated when appearing in conjuncts, losing part of their basic shape.
Some consonants have forms that are used regularly, but only within conjuncts.
When serving as a vowel sign, উ u, ঊ u, and ঋ ri take on many exceptional forms.
ঃ -h and ং -ng are also often used as abbreviation marks in Bengali, with ং -ng used when the next sound following the abbreviation would be a nasal sound, and ঃ -h otherwise. For example ডঃ dôh stands for ডক্টর dôktôr "doctor" and নং nông stands for নম্বর nômbôr "number". Some abbreviations have no marking at all, as in ঢাবি dhabi for ঢাকা বিশ্ববিদ্যালয় Dhaka Bishbôbidyalôy "Dhaka University". The full stop can also be used when writing out English letters as initials, such as ই.ইউ. i.iu "E.U.".
The apostrophe, known in Bengali as ঊর্ধ্বকমা urdhbôkôma "upper comma", is sometimes used to distinguish between homographs, as in পাটা pata "plank" and পা'টা pa'ta "the leg". Sometimes a hyphen is used for the same purpose (as in পা-টা, an alternative of পা'টা).
ৎ (called খণ্ড-ত khôndô tô "broken tô") is always used syllable-finally and always pronounced as /t̪/. It is predominantly found in loan words from Sanskrit such as ভবিষ্যৎ bhôbishyôt "future", সত্যজিৎ sôtyôjit (a proper name), etc. It is also found in some onomatopoeic words (such as থপাৎ thôpat "sound of something heavy that fell", মড়াৎ môrat "sound of something breaking", etc.), as the first member of some consonant conjuncts (such as ৎস tsô, ৎপ tpô, ৎক tkô, etc.), and in some foreign loanwords (e.g. নাৎসি natsi "Nazi", জুজুৎসু jujutsu "Jujutsu", ৎসুনামি tsunami "Tsunami", etc.) which contain the same conjuncts. This is an over-production inconsistency, where the sound /t̪/ is realized by both ত and ৎ. This creates confusion among inexperienced writers of Bengali. There is no simple way of telling which symbol should be used. Usually, the contexts where ৎ is used need to be memorized, as these are less frequent. In the native Bengali words, syllable-final ত tô /t̪ɔ/ is pronounced /t̪/, as in নাতনি /nat̪ni/ "grand daughter", করাত /kɔrat̪/ "saw", etc.
The Bengali script has ten Numerical digits (graphemes or symbols indicating the numbers from 0 to 9). Bengali numerals have no horizontal headstroke or মাত্রা "matra".
Numbers larger than 9 are written in Bengali using a positional base 10 numeral system (the decimal system). A period or dot is used to denote the decimal separator, which separates the integral and the fractional parts of a decimal number. When writing large numbers with many digits, commas are used as delimiters to group digits, indicating the thousand (হাজার hajar), the hundred thousand or lakh (লাখ lakh or লক্ষ lôkkhô), and the ten million or hundred lakh or crore (কোটি kuti) units. In other words, going leftwards from the decimal separator, the first grouping consists of three digits, and the subsequent groupings always consist of 2 digits.
For example, the English number 17,557,345 will be written in traditional Bengali as ১,৭৫,৫৭,৩৪৫.
Bengali punctuation marks, apart from the downstroke দাড়ি dari (|), the Bengali equivalent of a full stop, have been adopted from western scripts and their usage is similar. Commas, semicolons, colons, quotation marks, etc. are the same as in English. The concept of using capital letters is absent in the Bengali script, hence proper names are unmarked.
Bengali text is written and read horizontally, from left to right. The consonant graphemes and the full form of vowel graphemes fit into an imaginary rectangle of uniform size (i.e. uniform width and height). The size of a consonant conjunct, regardless of its complexity, is deliberately maintained the same as that of a single consonant grapheme, so that diacritic vowel forms can be attached to it without any distortion. In a typical Bengali text, orthographic words, i.e., words as they are written, can be seen as being separated from each other by an even spacing. Graphemes within a word are also evenly spaced, but this spacing is much narrower than the spacing between words.
Unlike in western scripts (Latin, Cyrillic, etc.) where the letter-forms stand on an invisible baseline, the Bengali letter-forms instead hang from a visible horizontal left-to-right headstroke called মাত্রা matra. The presence and absence of this matra can be important. For example, the letter ত tô and the numeral ৩ "3" are distinguishable only by the presence or absence of the matra, as is the case between the consonant cluster ত্র trô and the independent vowel এ e. The letter-forms also employ the concepts of letter-width and letter-height (the vertical space between the visible matra and an invisible baseline).
According to Bengali linguist Munier Chowdhury, there are about 9 graphemes that are the most frequent in Bengali texts, shown with its percentage of appearance in the table in right.[2]
In the Bengali script, clusters of consonants are represented by different and sometimes quite irregular forms; thus, learning to read is complicated by the sheer size of the full set of letters and letter combinations, numbering about 350. While efforts at standardizing the alphabet for the Bengali language continue in such notable centres as the Bangla Academy at Dhaka (Bangladesh) and the Pôshchimbônggô Bangla Akademi at Kolkata (West Bengal, India), it is still not quite uniform as yet, as many people continue to use various archaic forms of letters, resulting in concurrent forms for the same sounds. Among the various regional variations within this script, only the Assamese and Bengali variations exist today in the formalized system.
It seems likely that the standardization of the alphabet will be greatly influenced by the need to typeset it on computers. The large alphabet can be represented, with a great deal of ingenuity, within the ASCII character set, omitting certain irregular conjuncts. Work has been underway since around 2001 to develop Unicode fonts, and it seems likely that it will split into two variants, traditional and modern. In this and other articles on WorldHeritage dealing with the Bengali language, a Romanization scheme used by linguists specializing in Bengali phonology is included along with IPA transcription. A recent effort by the Government of West Bengal focused on simplifying Bengali orthography in primary school texts.
There is yet to be a uniform standard collating sequence (sorting order of graphemes to be used in dictionaries, indices, computer sorting programs, etc.) of Bengali graphemes. Experts in both Bangladesh and India are currently working towards a common solution for this problem.
The Romanization of Bengali is the representation of the Bengali language in the Latin script. There are various ways of Romanization systems of Bengali created in recent years which have failed to represent the true Bengali phonetic sound. While different standards for romanization have been proposed for Bengali, these have not been adopted with the degree of uniformity seen in languages such as Japanese or Sanskrit.[nb 5] The Bengali script has often been included with the group of Indic scripts for romanization where the true phonetic value of Bengali is never represented. Some of them are the "International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration" or IAST system (based on diacritics),[3] "Indian languages Transliteration" or ITRANS (uses upper case alphabets suited for ASCII keyboards),[4] and the National Library at Calcutta romanization.[5]
Bengali in Bengali alphabet
Bengali in phonetic Romanization
Bengali in IPA
Gloss
Translation
Bengali script was added to the Unicode Standard in October, 1991 with the release of version 1.0.
The Unicode block for Bengali is U+0980–U+09FF:
Bangladesh, India, Assam, West Bengal, Rabindranath Tagore
Dhaka, India, Bengali language, Pakistan, Chittagong
Delhi, India, Rajasthan, Pakistan, Maharashtra
Bengal, Mughal Empire, Bangladesh, Odisha, Bihar
Bangladesh, East Pakistan, History of Bangladesh, Bangladesh Liberation War, Muhammad Ali Jinnah
Devanagari, Malayalam script, Gurmukhī script, Tamil script, Gujarati script
Bangladesh, Bengali alphabet, Bengali numerals, Dhaka, Vehicle registration plates of Iran
Pinyin, Alphabet, Devanagari, List of writing systems, Braille
Devanagari, Javanese script, Buddhism, List of writing systems, Hangul