In the context of Bengali romanisation, it is important to distinguish
transliteration
from
transcription
. Transliteration is orthographically accurate (the original spelling can be recovered), but transcription is phonetically accurate (the pronunciation can be reproduced). English does not have all sounds of Bengali, and pronunciation does not completely reflect orthography. The aim of romanisation is not the same as phonetic transcription. Rather, romanisation is a representation of one
writing system
in
Roman (Latin) script
. If Bengali script has "?" and Bengalis pronounce it /to/ there is nevertheless an argument based on writing-system consistency for transliterating it as "?" or "ta." The writing systems of most languages do not faithfully represent the spoken sound of the language, as famously with English words like "enough," "women," or "nation" (see "
ghoti
").
歷史
[
??
]
Portuguese missionaries stationed in Bengal in the 16th century were the first people to employ the
Latin alphabet
in writing Bengali books. The most famous are the
Crepar Xaxtrer Orth, Bhed
and the
Vocabolario em idioma Bengalla, e Portuguez dividido em duas partes
, both written by
Manuel da Assumpcao
. However, the Portuguese-based romanisation did not take root. In the late 18th century, Augustin Aussant used a romanisation scheme based on the French alphabet. At the same time,
Nathaniel Brassey Halhed
used a romanisation scheme based on English for his Bengali grammar book. After Halhed, the renowned English philologist and oriental scholar
Sir William Jones
devised a romanisation scheme for Bengali and other Indian languages in general; he published it in the
Asiatick Researches
journal in 1801.
[4]
His scheme came to be known as the "Jonesian system" of romanisation and served as a model for the next century and a half.
音譯和轉錄
[
??
]
Romanisation of a language written in a non-Roman script can be based on either
transliteration
(
orthographically
accurate and the original spelling can be recovered) or
transcription
(phonetically accurate, and the pronunciation can be reproduced). The distinction is important in Bengali, as its orthography was adopted from Sanskrit and ignores several millennia of sound change. All writing systems differ at least slightly from the way the language is pronounced, but this is more extreme for languages like Bengali. For example, the three letters ?, ?, and ? had distinct pronunciations in Sanskrit, but over several centuries, the standard pronunciation of Bengali (usually modelled on the
Nadia
dialect) has lost the phonetic distinctions, and all three are usually pronounced as IPA
[??]
. The spelling distinction persists in orthography.
In written texts, distinguishing between homophones, such as ???
shap
"curse" and ???
shap
"snake", is easy. Such a distinction could be particularly relevant in searching for the term in an encyclopaedia, for example. However, the fact that the words sound identical means that they would be transcribed identically, so some important distinctions of meaning cannot be rendered by transcription. Another issue with transcription systems is that cross-dialectal and cross-
register
differences are widespread, so the same word or
lexeme
may have many different transcriptions. Even simple words like ?? "mind" may be pronounced "mon", "mon", or (in poetry) "mono" (as in the Indian national anthem, "
Jana Gana Mana
").
Often, different
phonemes
are represented by the same symbol or
grapheme
. Thus, the vowel ? can represent either
[e]
(??
elo
[el?]
"came") or
[?]
(??
ek
[?k]
"one"). Occasionally, words written in the same way (
homograph
s) may have different pronunciations for differing meanings: ?? can mean "opinion" (pronounced
mot
), or "similar to" (
moto
). Therefore, some important phonemic distinctions cannot be rendered in a transliteration model. In addition, to represent a Bengali word to allow speakers of other languages to pronounce it easily, it may be better to use a transcription, which does not include the silent letters and other idiosyncrasies (?????????
sbasthyo
, spelled <sw?sthya>, or ??????
oggen
, spelled <ajn?na>) that make Bengali romanisation so complicated. Such letters are misleading in a phonetic romanisation of Bengali and are a result of often inclusion of the Bengali script with other
Indic scripts
for romanisation, but the other Indic scripts lack the inherent vowel o, which causes chaos for Bengali romanisation.
A phenomenon in which romanisation of Bengali unintentionally leads to humorous results when translated is known as
Murad Takla
.
羅馬?音化
[
??
]
Comparisons of the standard romanisation schemes for Bengali are given in the table below. Two standards are commonly used for transliteration of Indic languages, including Bengali. Many standards (like NLK/ISO), use diacritic marks and permit case markings for proper nouns. Schemes such as the Harvard-Kyoto one are more suited for
ASCII
-derivative keyboards and use upper- and lower-case letters contrastively, so forgo normal standards for English capitalisation.
- "NLK" stands for the diacritic-based letter-to-letter transliteration schemes, best represented by the
National Library at Kolkata romanisation
or the
ISO 15919
, or
IAST
. It is the ISO standard, and it uses diacritic marks like ? to reflect the additional characters and sounds of Bengali letters.
- ITRANS
is an
ASCII
representation for Sanskrit; it is one-to-many: more than one way of transliterating characters may be used, which can make internet searches more complicated. ITRANS ignores English capitalisation norms to permit representing characters from a normal ASCII keyboard.
- "HK" stands for two other case-sensitive letter-to-letter transliteration schemes:
Harvard-Kyoto
and XIAST scheme. Both are similar to the ITRANS scheme and use only one form for each character.