Bengali Serial Script Pdf
Author Metcalfe
Though there were early attempts to cut Bengali types[27] it was the East India Company's interest in propagating the Bengali language[28] that ultimately prevailed. It first commissioned Willem Bolt, a Dutch adventurer, to create a grammar for Bengali, but he had to leave India after he ran into trouble with the company.[29] The first significant book with Bengali typography was Halhed's 1778 "A Grammar of the Bengal Language"[30] which he compiled from a meagre set of six Bengali manuscripts.[31] When Halhed turned to Warren Hastings for publishing, he was referred to Charles Wilkins, the type-founder at the Company press at Hoogly. Learned in Sanskrit and Persian, Wilkins singlehandedly cut the most complete set. He was assisted by the Bengali blacksmith, Panchanan Karmakar, who is often erroneously credited as the father of the Bengali type.[32]
In this and other articles on Wikipedia dealing with the Assamese and Bengali languages, a Romanization scheme used by linguists specialising in Bengali phonology and a separate Assamese transliteration table used by linguists specialising in Assamese phonology are included along with IPA transcription.
There are three major modern alphabets in this script: Bengali, Assamese, and Tirhuta. Modern Assamese is very similar to modern Bengali. Assamese has at least one extra letter, ৱ, that Bengali does not. It also uses a separate letter for the sound 'ro' ৰ different from the letter used for that sound in Bengali র and the letter ক্ষ is not a conjunct as in Bengali, but a letter by itself. The alphabetical orders of the two alphabets also differ, in the position of the letter ক্ষ, for example. Languages like Meitei and Bishnupriya use a hybrid of the two alphabets, with the Bengali র and the Assamese ৱ. Tirhuta is more different and carries forward some forms used in medieval Assamese.[citation needed]
The script presently has a total of 11 vowel letters, used to represent the seven vowel sounds of Bengali and eight vowel sounds of Assamese, along with a number of vowel diphthongs. All of these vowel letters are used in both Assamese and Bengali. Some of the vowel letters have different sounds depending on the word, and a number of vowel distinctions preserved in the writing system are not pronounced as such in modern spoken Bengali or Assamese. For example, the script has two symbols for the vowel sound [i] and two symbols for the vowel sound [u]. This redundancy stems from the time when this script was used to write Sanskrit, a language that had a short [i] and a long [iː], and a short [u] and a long [uː]. These letters are preserved in the script with their traditional names of "short i" and "long i", etc., despite the fact that they are no longer pronounced differently in ordinary speech.
In the Bengali alphabet, অ্য is used when the intended pronunciation would otherwise be ambiguous.[clarification needed] Some other languages use a vowel অ to denote /ɯ/ which is not found in either Bengali or Assamese; and though the vowel diacritic (matra, ) is found in Tirhuta the vowel letter itself is absent. Assamese alphabet uses an additional "matra" (ʼ) that is used to represent the phonemes অʼ and এʼ.
Vowel signs can be used in conjunction with consonants to modify the pronunciation of the consonant (here exemplified by ক, k). When no vowel Diacritic symbol is written, then the vowel "অ" () is the default inherited vowel for the consonant. To specifically denote the absence of a vowel, a hsnt (্) may be written underneath the consonant.
The names of the consonant letters in Eastern Nagari are typically just the consonant's main pronunciation plus the inherent vowel "অ" . 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 ঘ gh, not gh). Some letters that have lost their distinctive pronunciation in Modern Assamese and Bengali are called by a more elaborate name. For example, since the consonant phoneme /n/ can be written ন, ণ, or ঞ (depending on the spelling of the particular word), these letters are not simply called n; instead, they are called "dental n", "cerebral n" and ni. Similarly, the phoneme /ʃ/ in Bengali and /x/ in Assamese can be written as "palatal sh/xh" শ, "cerebral sh/xh" ষ, or "dental s/x" স, depending on the word.
The Bengali script or Bangla alphabet (Bengali: বল বর্ণমল, romanized: Bangla brṇmala, Meitei: বঙ্গল ময়ক, romanized: Bengali mayek) is the alphabet used to write the Bengali language based on the Bengali-Assamese script, and has historically been used to write Sanskrit within Bengal. It is one of the most widely adopted writing systems in the world (used by over 265 million people).[5]It is one of the official scripts of the Indian Republic. It is used as the official script of the Bengali language in Bangladesh, West Bengal, Tripura and Barak valley of Assam Until recently, it was the usual script for the Meitei language in Manipur, but is being replaced by Meitei mayek.[6] two of the official languages of India.[7][8]
From a classificatory point of view, the Bengali writing system is an abugida, i.e. its vowel graphemes are mainly realised not as independent letters, but as diacritics modifying the vowel inherent in the base letter they are added to. It is written from left to right and uses a single letter case, which makes it a unicameral script, as opposed to a bicameral one like the Latin script. It is recognisable, as are some other Brahmic scripts, by a distinctive horizontal line known as a mātrā (মত্র) running along the tops of the letters that links them together. The Bengali writing system is less blocky, however, and presents a more sinuous shape than the Devanagari script.[9]
The Bengali script can be divided into vowels and vowel diacritics, consonants and Conjunct consonants, diacritical and other symbols, digits and punctuation marks. Vowels and consonants are used as letters and also as diacritical marks.
The Bengali script has a total of 11 vowel graphemes, each of which is called a স্বরবর্ণ swrbrn "vowel letter". The swrbrns represent six of the seven main vowel sounds of Bengali, along with two vowel diphthongs. All of them are used in both Bengali and Assamese languages.
But now using বসর্গ bishrg for making abbreviations is considered grammatically wrong and now dot is used for making abbreviations (as in ক.ম. for the word কলমটর " kilometer", or ড. for ডক্তর dāktār "doctor" which are respectively similar to "km" and "Dr" in English) is grammatically correct.[16][17]
Bengali punctuation marks, apart from the downstroke দড় 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. Capital letters are absent in the Bengali script so 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 (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, 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 that spacing is much narrower than the spacing between words.
Unlike in western scripts (Latin, Cyrillic, etc.) for which the letter-forms stand on an invisible baseline, the Bengali letter-forms instead hang from a visible horizontal left-to-right headstroke called মত্র matra. The presence and absence of this matra can be important. For example, the letter ত t 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 tr 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).
In the 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. Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar introduced punctuation marks in Bengali language and wrote a book named Barnaparichay to standardize Bengali alphabets.While efforts at standardising the alphabet for the Bengali language continue in such notable centres as the Bangla Academy at Dhaka (Bangladesh) and the Pshchimbngg Bangla Akademi at Kolkata (West Bengal, India), it is still not quite uniform yet, as many people continue to use various archaic forms of letters, resulting in concurrent forms for the same sounds.
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 but failed to represent the true Bengali phonetic sound. While different standards for romanisation have been proposed for Bengali, they have not been adopted with the degree of uniformity seen in languages such as Japanese or Sanskrit.[nb 2] The Bengali alphabet has often been included with the group of Brahmic scripts for romanisation in which the true phonetic value of Bengali is never represented. Some of them are the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration or "IAST system"[19] "Indian languages Transliteration" or ITRANS (uses upper case alphabets suited for ASCII keyboards),[20] and the extension of IAST intended for non-Sanskrit languages of the Indian region called the National Library at Kolkata romanisation.[21]
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