Bengali language: Encyclopedia II - Bengali language - Script

Bengali language - Script

Main article: Bengali script

Bangla is written in the Bangla alphasyllabary (also called syllabic alphabet or abugida), a Brahmic script similar to the Devanagari alphasyllabary used for Hindi, Sanskrit, and many other Indic languages. The Bangla alphasyllabary is a cursive script with 12 vowel characters and 52 consonant characters. As in all alphasyllabaries, every consonant in the Bangla script can come with what is called an "embedded" or "inherent" vowel sound. For example, the simple letter ম can represent the consonant [m] in a word like কম [kɔm] "less". However, in another word, the same letter ম can represent the sequences [mɔ] or [mo], as in মত [mɔt̪] "opinion" and মন [mon] "mind", respectively, with no added symbol for the vowels [ɔ] or [o]. If the consonant sound is followed by some other vowel sound in the pronunciation, this can be written by writing a variety of vowel diacritics above, below, before, after, or around the consonant they belong to. Vowels not associated with a consonant (for example, vowels at the beginning of a word) are written with separate symbols. To emphatically indicate that a consonant is not pronounced with the embedded vowel, an extra diacritic may be added below the consonant. Consonant clusters are typically indicated by ligating two or more consonant symbols.

The Bangla spelling system is based on a much older version of the language, and thus does not take into acount some sound mergers that have occurred in the spoken language. For example, the alphabet has two letters for the sound [dʒ] and three for the sound [ʃ]. Conversely, a number of letters now have more than one pronunciation; the letter এ can represent either the low vowel [æ] or the high-mid vowel [e]. Furthermore, many letters and diacritics have become "silent letters" in the spoken language. The word for "health", for example, is written 'swasthyô', but pronounced [ʃast̪ʰo]. With these minor inconsistencies and redundancies, the Bangla script cannot be described as entirely phonemic.

This same script, with a few small modifications, is also used for writing Assamese. Other related languages in the region also make use of the Bangla alphabet. Meithei (Manipuri), a Sino-Tibetan language used in the Indian state of Manipur, was written in the Bangla alphasyllabary for centuries, until the 1980s, when Meetei Mayek (the Meithei alphasyllabary) returned to daily usage. For centuries, the Sylheti language used a different script, based on the Devanagari alphasyllabary. This script, called Sylheti Nagori, has now fallen out of use, as most speakers of Sylheti have adopted the Bangla script.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Script", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki