Talk:Bengali script

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Contents 1 Script 2 Bengali vowels 3 uņo versus ungo 4 Merge with Assamese script? 5 transliteration 6 Names of Letters 7 Charles Wilkins and Robert B. Wray 8 Distinct Bengali letters with the same pronunciation

[edit] Script

I have added the table for Bangla script just now (although due my stupidity, it got registered as anon edit)! I am not sure of the IPA symbols. So if anyone with knowledge of IPA could please go through it, it would be excellent. Also, could someone make sure that all the letters in Assamese script are on the table and the numbers are transliterated properly? Thanks. -- Urnonav 06:22, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

---

I have just (anonymously) edited the IPA transcriptions, along with some other minor points. Please let me know if anyone has any objection to the corrections.

--SameerKhan 07:44, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Bengali vowels

I made some changes to the vowel table yesterday which I thought was fixing a display issue. It seems I was wrong. The following is from my talk page:

My primary browser is Opera and the vowel symbols were appearing on the wrong side of the consonant so I thought I would change it. But then differring browser rendering reared its ugly head. I have made screen shots of the table column in question from Opera 8, Mozilla Firefox 1 and MS IE 6 (all under Windows).

	Opera	Firefox	IE
Before my change:
After my change:

On my system it seems that IE is being the rogue. The Firefox result is interesting as it doesn't correlate with what SameerKhan has said.

The ultimate purpose of this long winded passage is to find out what other people are seeing in order to keep the most "correct" version. Which version is correct for you - pre or post? What browser/OS are you using? Do you have any ideas on what can be done to ensure universal correctness (heh!) in the future?

--TheParanoidOne 21:53, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

The thing about unicoded Bangla text occurs because of the browser's different rendering of Bangla/eastern/complex text. IE is correct in rendering the text before your changes. Firefox won't render Bangla script correctly in WindowsXP (Which I assume you are using), unless Service Pack 2 is installed, and ControlPanel->Regional and Language settings->Languages->Support for Eastern/complex script is checked. I guess the same would happen with Opera. Unicode is phonetic, so Ki would be "ka" followed by "Hrossho e". This will show up fine in IE. If you have the support installed, it will show up fine in Opera/Firefox too. For more info on how to enable Bangla rendering support, see this link. Anyway, the bottom line is the post-vowel version is the correct unicode version, and would show up well in all browsers in properly configured systems. Hope this helps. Thanks. --Ragib 06:07, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

Agreed with Ragib. I forgot to mention that I had already reset my Windows configurations to read "Eastern/complex scripts". Before doing that, Mozilla would read the characters the way you (TheParanoidOne) display them on your screenshot. You have to go through and fix that on your system to be able to read the vowels correctly. As they stand now, for people who have Eastern/complex scripts turned on, Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox both have Unicode dotted circles before the consonants. I am going to go through and fix the vowels, but you won't be able to read them properly unless you switch to "Eastern/Complex". --SameerKhan 20:25, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] uņo versus ungo

OK, the ending of uņo is definitely not uņô. The ņ versus n-g is actually an interesting problem. Once again it goes back to "East Bengal" versus "West Bengal". For example, even in Bangladesh, let's say someone from Jhenaidah (or any other place from Khulna or Rajshahi Division) would say Baņali. However, someone from Borishal would say Ban-gali. I am guessing this has some linguistic implication. Well, whether we like it or not Bangla from the West is considered "standard" and hence, I changed the ng to ņ. However, ng should be left separate because there are cases where n-g is needed like say in Bôngo.

Also I can't think of any place where শ is pronounced as s and not as sh. So I changed that too. -- Urnonav 23:30, 10 September 2005 (UTC)

I didn't change the "ņ" to "ng" to mean "ņg". I agree - I don't think anyone says "uņgo" (which I would have transcribed "unggo"). I changed it to "ng" because we've been writing "ng" in transcriptions like "bangla". I haven't seen anyone write "Baņla" yet. I guess I meant the "ng" to mean "ņ" in the same way that I changed the "ş" to "sh" - not a change in pronunciation but a change in simplicity/accessibility.

About শ being pronounced like "s", this is very common in clusters like "bisri", "srabon", "asrôe", "sromik", "sreshtho", etc. I agree that it never gets pronounced "s" when on its own, but its use as "s" in consonant clusters is common enough that it is transcribed as "s"/"sh" on omniglot.com, which is pretty well respected for transcription of orthographies. I am going to change it back to "s/sh" because of this. I will leave the "ņ" alone.

--SameerKhan 08:12, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

OK, I see both your points. I was acting like an idiot in the second case.

However, the first case reminds me of something else. ņ was initially used in the precursor of the scheme now on this page for a very simple reason: so that pronunciations like Baņali do not end up being Bang-gali to non-native speakers even when written as Bangali. It also bears similarity to the IPA symbol for this particular nasal(?) sound.

History aside, we need to use a symbol to express points where two different consonant sounds meet. I am not sure what this is technically called. You'd know better! Examples like "bông-go", "brid-dho", "bôd-dho". The "-" might work, but I'm sure we can think of something slightly less unsightly.

Urnonav 07:43, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

no worries. i understand your concerns and i was thinking someone would bring them up when i initially made my changes.

i don't agree on the need for a hyphen or other marking to designate where one sound ends and another begins, however. for the vast majority of cases, this would not make anything clearer. for example, in "briddho", there would be no confusion of whether the sounds break up as "bri-ddho", "bridd-ho", "briddh-o", or "brid-dho", as one would simply know if they understand the phonology of bangla. those who would not care to understand the phonology of bangla would probably not be bothered by the meaning of a hyphen anyhow, i would suspect. the only places where distinctions could theoretically happen (other than your "ņ" vs "ņg" cases) would be between morphemes (the meaningful parts of words) - like "din-guli" (which is neither "ņ" nor "ņg" but actually "ng"). still, i don't think this would show up in our articles enough to make any sort of convention on it. plus, it would be aesthetically unpleasant to break up all consonant-consonant boundaries.

still, i agree with you that we should keep the ņ~ņg distinction preserved.

--SameerKhan 11:09, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

---

Okay, first off, I use Mac OSX.4.2 with Safari web browser and Akaash unicode font. I'm having trouble with the Bengali ki (कि), ko, ke, kai, kou, ôntoshtho ô, and shunno's. Usually Mac is really good, I could normally type other Indian scripts straight into the text box, but I'm gonna have to write out the unicode here.

I've been impressed that this is perhaps the most cordial talk page I've ever been to (and noticed how much more you accomplish that way!), so please don't get cross at my ignorance. All I know is that there are standard transliteration conventions. I prefer the IAST, because whether it be Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Urdu, Tamil, whatever, it operates the same. Now I'm not real familiar with Bengali, but I was watching Ghaire Baire and the sounds weren't that different. I'm suspecting this was very formal old style 'Tagore' Bengali because I was recognizing quite a few words! Anyway, to my point (finally!):

Bengali, as I've seen before, has its own conventions, so take these with a grain of salt and opt for the traditional way - I'm not an Hindi imperialist! I can see how 'ô' might represent the sound better than the traditional inherent 'a', thus 'ā' really isn't necessary, so damn convention there. But might tradition be followed for ই and ঊ though (ī, ū)? I'm not talking about pronunciation but just the mechanics of transliteration here. I don't know, would probably just confuse people.

The following are my humble suggestions, the ones which aren't standardized I've noted:

• ঙ - ṅ
• চ - c
• ছ - ch
• ঞ - ñ
• ট - ṭ
• ঠ - ṭh
• ড - ḍ
• ঢ - ḍh
• ণ - ṇ
• য - ? have no idea what to do here! ÿ, ǰ?
• শ - ś
• ষ - ṣ
• ড় - ṛ
• ঢ় - ṛh
• ক্ - ' (?, better than dash perhaps?)
• কত্ - ṯ (???! have no idea what this is, reminds me of ة though)
• কং - ṃ (or ṅ, but than what is ঙ?, ń? Maybe ņ is fine or ŋ).
• কঃ - ḥ
• কঁ - ṁ (I like using ⁿ though)
• কৃ - kŗ (since unicode doesn't support the ring)

In Hindi Bengali would be बंगला (or बंगाली) which would be baṅgla, since the ŋ sound doesn't occur on its own, but only when followed by 'g'. But since ং does (?!) and transliteration should represent one character for one character: ŋ is recognizable, but ņ works too! Or 'ng'. I like the ņ~ņg distinction best, if I understand correctly and the situation is similar to other Indian languages. I'm just way, way out of my element here and don't know anything about West/East differences, or Bengali orthography. I also guess I'm spoiled that Hindi has one sound for one character. I would have no idea what to do with the s/sh situation, except explain rules (if there are any). Like the Hindi śrī sounds more like a sibilant sʼ sometimes, which I think just happens naturally, like how in English most 'th' sounds are ð (thee), but when they're followed by 'r' they turn to þ (three). This may be of absolutely no relevance to anyone though, just stream of consciousness writing. I also came into the problem with when to use dashes in my still incomplete wikitravel:Hindi-Urdu phrasebook. I opted out. Just too many problems, and it complicates things more than my brain can handle. Sorry if I've sounded like a long-winded and condescending jackass! Too little sleep + too much coffee is oft a precarious situation. Khirad^talk 23:29, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

First of all, thanks so much for taking the time to read through this article and putting so much work into these suggestions!

I feel that a lot of your transliteration ideas are great for a one-to-one spelling correspondence between Bangla and English, but believe that for the purposes of just spelling out Bangla words in a way that is accurate, easy to understand, and not redundant, there is no need to make as many distinctions as you have proposed. An analogous situation would be if a Wikipedia article written in Bangla about the English language were to make use of a transliteration scheme that preserved silent "k" in "know" or a distinction between the "ee" in "meet" and the "ea" in "meat". These distinctions are only relevant for spelling the language in its native script, not for a transliteration of the language. Thus, differentiating a dental "n", a cerebral "n", and a palatal "n" would ignore the fact that these three letters represent what is now phonologically one sound in Bangla, even if there are slightly different pronunciations given the phonological environment of the letters. Also, differentiating different letters for "sh"/"s" would be trying to reinject the pronunciations of Classical Sanskrit instead of the reality now, where Bengali speakers continue to ask "is it talobbo shô, donto shô, or murdhonno shô?"

More on the "sh"/"s" - it's not as simple as a phonological alternation between the two sounds. There are no regular rules. There are simply two phonemes, "s" and "sh", which happen to use three letters in an irregular way. There are minimal pairs like 'aste' "slowly/softly", and 'ashte' "to come" - some dialects have more minimal pairs than others. Phonological rules would not determine which sound would occur where, although there are a few small regularities - e.g. "sh" is not found in clusters, only "s"... "s" cannot occur intervocalically in Standard Bangla, only "sh"... etc.

Between borgio jô (borgijjô) and ôntostho jô (ontoste jô), there is no pronunciation difference. The words 'jan' "dear" (written with borgio jô) and 'jan' "you go (formal)" (written with ôntostho jô) are pronounced identically. The difference in spelling is extremely archaic and no distinction is preserved. This is similar to the situation in English where the "g" in "gel" and the "j" in "jelly" are pronounced identically and the distinction is only maintained in English spelling, not in a transcription or transliteration of the language.

The khônđo tô, where you said "have no idea what this is", is simply the form of the letter tô when a hôshonto would normally be added to it. This is a peculiarity of the Bangla alphabet, and is mostly stylistic in nature. Many words can be written either with tô or khônđo tô depending on the writer's choice or the font used.

I do agree that it would be nice to have a standard underdot for the retroflex sounds ţ, ţh, đ, đh, ŗ, and ŗh (I don't think we need one for ņ, as this letter has lost its distinctive quality). This is something that I think we should adopt, if it proves convenient for the regular contributors to this article.

Overall, I see where your concerns are. However, I feel we should stick to the idea of maintaining a one-to-one sound correspondence, and not a one-to-one letter correspondence between Bangla and English for the purposes of this article. I of course love the peculiarities of Bangla spelling, but I feel it is unnecessarily confusing and misleading to artifically inject some of the archaic spelling rules of Bangla into a modern Latin-based transliteration of the language.

I hope this has been helpful! It is also pretty late for me (about 3am) so I may also sound either harsh or convoluted. Don't misunderstand! I love the criticism. Thank you so much for your input! --SameerKhan 10:07, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Merge with Assamese script?

Since both the Bengali script and Assamese script pages basically deal with the same information, we could merge these two into the "Bengali-Assamese Script" article. I could definitely, however, imagine that there could be people on both sides of the putative merger who would be vehemently opposed. What do you all think? --SameerKhan 05:16, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

I'd oppose the merger. I think the Assamese script can redirect to Bangla script. Or even better, we can have a parent article with links to both pages. The reason is that Bangla is more widely used (20 times more), and Bangla script has a only slight difference (some letters) with Assamese script. Bangla script, language etc are more commonly used terms, unlike the Bangla-Assamese script. Thanks. --Ragib 05:30, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

I'd support the merger. I do not think the number argument is relevant when it comes to something like a script. The two scripts are nearly identical and they share a common history. Moreover, for technical reasons, they are considered the same script. For example, the Unicode has just script one script for both Assamese and Bengali. So I support a merger. Chaipau 11:49, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

I support the merger, and yesterday made the merge. Chaipau reverted it... but I am not sure why. No one opposed the proposal to move on the Assamese Talk page. Here, I see no real opposition. So, may we merge after all? -- Evertype·✆ 13:10, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

I was earlier of the opinion that they should be merged. I have now changed my opinion. They should not be merged because this page is language specific. Even though I tried to reconcile this article to support both the languages I think it is not workable. I would rather support a parent article as Ragib suggested, which would link to two daughter articles for the script used in the two languages. Chaipau 04:37, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

I don't believe that this makes sense. There is only one script here. It's called Bengali. It's used for several languages. Now, the Bengali script has a Bengali alphabet, used for the Bengali language, an Assamese alphabet used for the Assamese language (which differs from the Bengali alphabet in two letters), a Meitei alphabet used (alongside Meitei Mayek) for the Meitei language, and doubtless some more. There is, in fact, no "Assamese script". What advantage to users of the Wikipedia is there for there this article to be split? The basic merge which I propose to re-instate did so pretty reasonably, though it might be possible to re-do the Assamese section to neaten it up. I think this is quite workable. In any case, the article Assamese script is misleading because it is not a separate script, but an alphabet. -- Evertype·✆ 09:52, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

If we're being technical here, none of these are "alphabets" (see Alphabet), but "alphasyllabaries"/"abugidas". But we could have a parent article, as mentioned by Chaipau and Ragib. I agree that trying to merge all the current articles into one would be really difficult, as each language has its own name and pronunciation of the same glyph. --SameerKhan 10:34, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

In this instance, I was using "alphabet" in a different sense. Yes, structurally, there are alphabets, abugidas, and abjads. Here, however, I was using "alphabet" in the sense of "ordered subset of a script used to write a particular language". The Bengali alphabet and the Assamese alphabet are mostly the same, but Assamese uses two additional letters. Honestly, I think the right thing to do is to merge the Assamese script material to this page, and then to rewrite the page so that it first deals with the script as an entity, and then in two subsections describes how the script is used for the Bengali language and the Assamese language. Otherwise, material in the Bengali script should be moved out of this article to a new Bengali alphabet article, and the Assamese script article needs to be renamed Assamese alphabet. Wouldn't it be easier to keep everything here? -- Evertype·✆ 11:55, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

When you guys mention Meitei, are you talking about the actual Meitei script (extinct since Shantidas Goswami brought Bangla script to Manipur) or are you talking about Bisnupriya? Bisnupriya is nearly identical to Bangla (ask Usingha (talk · contribs)) while Meitei mayek is more similar to Asian scripts . I'm not too familiar with the differences between Oxomiya and Bangla script, but doesnt Oxomiya have "x" as an actual sound? Bakaman _Bakatalk 17:14, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

I support a parent article as Ragib mentioned. As this script is used to write amny langauges of the Estern India like Bengali, Assamese, Manipuri etc, I propose to rename the script to a more general term like "Easten Neo-Brahmic" in place of "Bengali Script". In my opinion, the term "Bengali Script" is misleading. Bikram98 18:15, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I'd support something like what Bikram98 suggested. Articles like Cyrillic alphabet and Latin alphabet are of this type - they are both alphabets used for a wide variety of languages, and so they describe the commonalities along with the language-specific differences. Since the written form of Bengali, Assamese, Manipuri, etc., all use the same basic script ("same" = just as close as English and German, for example, where the latter has the English set of symbols plus ä, ö, ü, and ß) with only very minor differences. Of course, the article would be longer, but comparing with the other articles I've mentioned, I think it would be appropriate. --SameerKhan 18:36, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

How about this?

Eastern Neo-Brahmic script is the parent article.

Bengali script

Assamese script

Manipuri script

These three are subarticles under the parent article. There is one section for each of these scripts in the parent article, with links to the corresponding sub articles.

This will adhere to the summary style. Since there are some differences in the scripts, we can have specific articles for each script, and then combine the whole into a parent article.

Thanks. --Ragib 18:41, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I would support Ragib's plan, although I could go for either Eastern Neo-Brahmic script or Eastern Nagari script. I'm not sure how best to capture a script that covers Bengali, Assamese, and Bishnupriya Manipuri but not Oriya or the Bihari languages (which have used the Tirhuta, Kaithi, Devanagari, and Eastern Brahmi/Nagari scripts at different times in history and for different languages). Linguistically, Bengali, Assamese, and B Manipuri form a subfamily (normally just called Bengali-Assamese), but if we want the script to not have "Bengali" or "Assamese" in the title, I don't know for sure what to use. --SameerKhan 05:17, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Let us work as per Ragib's plan. For the common name, I donot have any objection/preference for either name. --Bikram98 11:18, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

If you say Bengali script is used to write Assamese, Meitei etc, you need to include ৰ, ৱ etc to this article. Otherwise, let us remove these langauges from the Infobox. -Bikram98 06:57, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

No one is actually saying that. There is Assamese script. --Ragib 06:58, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] transliteration

this article needs serious cleanup, it appears to be using some sort of home-grown transliteration scheme at present. Either use the National Library at Kolkata romanization, or some specified official Bengali-specific scheme, but not something we made up ourselves. dab (𒁳) 10:09, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Names of Letters

The article seems to be giving the names of the consonants ā (aa) sounds rather than a (o) sounds. Surely this is just wrong?? It's certainly not what I was taught by my native Bangla-speaking wife... --Oolong 19:13, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

You're right, someone very recently changed the names of the letters on the article. I've reverted them back to our normal Romanization. --SameerKhan 21:14, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Charles Wilkins and Robert B. Wray

This article and also Charles Wilkins say that Sir Charles Wilkins created the first font for Bengali.

The article about Robert B. Wray says that he designed it and cites a source for it, too.

Can anyone please harmonize these articles?

Thanks in advance. --Amir E. Aharoni 09:59, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Distinct Bengali letters with the same pronunciation

Just a minor point I would like to bring up for discussion. While I don't deny that that there has been a gradual inclination towards several distinct letters beginning to "sound" similar, I don't believe this has entirely come to pass yet, and suggesting that it has might be misleading. For instance, the rhôshsho i and dirgho i still sound quite distinctive to me (compare say, ঈদ [eid] to any other Bengali word beginning with rhôshsho i). Similarly, the talobbo shô in শালিক (shalik) sounds quite distinguishable (to me) from the donto shô in সাদা (shada), as does the đhôe shunno ŗô in আষাঢ় (ashar - the season) from the bôe shunno rô in আসার (ashar - verb noun meaning coming/arrival).

Again, I am not suggesting that these letters will continue sounding different over time. However, I think that they do sound distinctive at present, at least in Standard Bengali.

--Shaad 15:08, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

My experience is exactly the opposite, that these sounds have long since merged in standard Bengali and are only distinguished by people who have learned the distinctions from other languages that still preserve them, such as Hindi. In ordinary, colloquial speech, the "i"s, "u"s, shos and, ros are indistinguishable. This issue also makes it particularly inappropriate to transliterate doe shunno ro and dhoe shunno ro as "d," which has become common for the transliteration of Hindi. Acsenray (talk) 20:47, 16 February 2008 (UTC)