Bengali/Bengali

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বাংলা


BENGALI


[Mamandel 17:06, 7 February 2012 (UTC)]

Contents

General

Language summary

(Information from Ethnologue, 2012-02-01)

Maps

Linguistic notes

Bengali (Chittagong)

Morphology

Bengali marks the plural by means of several different suffixes, the choice depending on the noun. There are several cases, also marked by suffixes.

Writing System

The Bengali script is an abugida, a Brahmi derivative with ligatures and with vowel markers located in various positions around the consonant.

Linguistic resources

Overview

  • Bhattacharya, Tanmoy. (2001): Bengali. In Facts About the World's Languages: An Encyclopedia of the World's Major Languages: Past and Present, ed. Jane Garry and Carl Rubino. New York / Dublin: H.W. Wilson Press. ISBN 0824209702.
  • Klaiman, M. H. (1987): Bengali. In The World's Major Languages, ed. Bernard Comrie, pp. 490-513. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0195065114.

Grammar

  • Milne, W. S. (1993): A Practical Bengali Grammar. Laurier Books Ltd. ISBN 8120608771. 562 pp.
  • Mojumder, Atindra (1973): Bengali Language Historical Grammar. Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay.
  • Smith, W. L. (1997): Bengali Reference Grammar. Stockholm: Association of International Studies. Stockholm Oriental Textbook Series 1. ISBN 9197085472. 197 pp.

Lexicon

  • Akkhor: An English to Bengali "translation" tool is included in a large package downloadable from this site. It appears to be a large dictionary, so it could be fed a list of English words, and would output a list of Bengali words. Encoding is unclear.
  • Bengali-Dictionary.com A Bilingual Dictionary of Words & Phrases (English-Bengali). Lookup in both directions.
  • Carey, William (1761-1834). A Dictionary of the Bengali Language. Laurier Books Ltd. 2160 pp. ISBN 8120600940.
  • Dev, Ashu Tosh (1961): Students' Favourite Dictionary: Bengali to English. 28th ed. Dev Sahitya Kutir. 998 p. Reprint. USD 7.75.
    • Also: 1961, 1291 pp. Calcutta: S.C. Mazumder.
  • Digital Dictionaries of South Asia at the University of Chicago:
  • GNU Dictionary: Monolingual dictionary, used by GNU project spell checker.
  • Online Bangla Obhidhan: Online lexicon, at least 6k unique entries. Akkhor encoding converter appears to work. This page gives gif of Bangla chars instead.
  • Wiktionary. Unicode. Monolingual. 713 entries. (CC-BY-SA),(GFDL)


Topical word lists

  • Pandanus Database of Indian Plants: 146 names of Indian plants in Bengali. Also has five other Indian languages (all in romanization), English, and Latin. Most of the other languages have more terms (e.g., Hindi has 670).
    Display Bengali names. Each name links to a list of names for the plant in all the languages and to a detailed set of descriptions from a number of sources.
  • COMMON NAMES OF PLANTS GROWING IN BANGLADESH AND WEST BENGAL (BENGALI). PDF image of typewritten document. About 450 "common names", all in Roman letters, matched to botanical name(s). Common names are tagged for language: Bengali, English, unknown, a few others. Looks like around 35-40% are English, and some of those are misspelled.
  • Common names of fish in Bangla: “215” common names, matched with scientific names.
Names
  • Babynology: List of Bengali given names in Roman transliteration, for naming babies.

Phrasebooks


Monographs

  • Bayer, Josef (2001): "Two grammars in one: sentential complements and complementizers in Bengali and other South-Asian languages," in Peri Bhaskararao and Karamuri Venkata Subbarao (eds.) The Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics: Tokyo Symposium on South-Asian Languages - Contact, Convergence and Typology. New Delhi: Sage Publications. PDF
  • Butt, Miriam (2001): "Case, Agreement, Pronoun Incorporation and Pro-Drop in South Asian Languages". Talk held at the Workshop on The Role of Agreement in Argument Structure, August 31-September 1, 2001, Utrecht. PS, PDF
  • Dirdal, Hildegunn (2005): "The acquisition of articles by Bengali learners of English". Presented at Forum for flerspråklig forskning — høstsemesteret 2005. Handout
  • Fitzpatrick-Cole, Jennifer (1990): The minimal word in Bengali. In The Proceedings of the Ninth West Coast Conferenceon Formal Linguistics,Stanford Linguistics Association, 1990.
  • Fitzpatrick-Cole, Jennifer (1994): The Prosodic Domain Hierarchy in Reduplication. Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford.
  • Fitzpatrick-Cole, Jennifer (1996): "Reduplication meets the phonological phrase in Bengali," Linguistic Review 13.305-356.
  • Ghosh, Sanjukta and Probal Dasgupta: "The role of classifiers in quantification," Handout for talk presented at the 21st South Asian Language Analysis Roundtable, October 7-10, University of Konstanz.
  • Keane, Elinor (2001): Echo Words in Tamil. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Merton College, Oxford. Contains a fairly extensive discussion of echo words in Bengali. Abstract
  • Khan, Zeeshan (1994): "Bangla Verb Classes and Alternations," in Douglas A. Jones, Robert C. Berwick, Franklin Cho, Zeeshan Khan, Karen T. Kohl, Naoyuki Nomura, Anand Radhakrishnan, Ulrich Sauerland, and Brian Ulicny, Verb Classes and Alternations in Bangla, German, English, and Korean (AI Memo # 1517). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT. pp. 36-50.
  • Lahiri, Aditi and Jennifer Fitzpatrick-Cole (1999): "Emphatic Clitics and Focus Intonation in Bengali," in René Kager & Wim Zonneveld (eds.) Phrasal Phonology. Pp. 119-144. Dordrecht: Foris.

Linguistic portals and bibliographies

Encoding and Fonts

Before the development and general use of Unicode, computer use of Bengali and other South Asian languages required special fonts using only one byte. Many of these fonts were specific to one website or another and used idiosyncratic encodings. To some extent that is still the case; and so this page includes some such sites (see News), and some resources for specific fonts and encoding converters. See, for example, eThikana below.

In addition, the Bureau of Indian Standards supports its own ISCII standard (below), which provides an 8-bit encoding using escape sequences to announce the language of the following coded character sequence.

Encodings

Unicode

The Unicode range for Bengali is 0980-09FF.

ISCII

Indian Script Code for Information Exchange. See ISCII.

Sutonny

This 8-bit encoding is used by a number of news sites. See eThikana: Sutonny under Fonts.

ITRANS and CS/CSX

ITRANS is a transliteration package, no longer supported [latest: Minor Updates Version 5.32, February 2011]   but still available as freeware. “A package for printing text in Indian languages using English-encoded input.” Provides two input encodings:

  • ITRANS: 7-bit; uses multi-character English codes to represent each Bengali letter
  • CS/CSX: 8-bit; uses one-character codes

The 8-bit encoding, at least, is still used on some sites. See ItxBeng under Fonts.

Fonts

  • Ekushey. 24 plain and fancy Unicode fonts, free download. [Mamandel 120626]
  • eThikana. All are 8-bit. Grouped by encoding:
    • Sutonny encoding: Oporajita (≠ Aparajita), Sulekha, MahouaMJ.
    • AdarshaBangla
    • AdarshaLipi, Moina
    • Aparajita (≠ Oporajita)
    • Basundhara
    • Boishakhi
    • Ekush, Falgun
    • Progoty
    • SonarGaon
  • ItxBeng is part of the ITRANS transliteration package. The itxbeng.ttf TrueType font uses an 8-bit encoding. It is also available from RabindraSangeet.org.
  • Omicron Lab. Unicode fonts for Bengali. “You will need Avro Keyboard ... to use these Unicode Bangla Fonts. Click here for FREE download”
  • Penn State University. Browser and Font Recommendations for Bengali. Also information on Setup for Keyboarding. (Last Modified: Monday, 29-Aug-2011)
  • Rezaul: The site is a portal of sorts; this directory has links to fonts and encoding documentation as well as typing software and other tools.
  • South Asia Language Resource Center of the University of Chicago. Links to Bengali fonts (most of them available for free download), input schemes and keyboard layouts, and information about Mac vs. PC vs. Linux rendering issues.

Also:

  • Microsoft. (2002) Creating and supporting OpenType fonts for the Bengali script: Microsoft doc on Unicode 3.1 for Bengali. “Registered features of the Bengali script are defined and illustrated, encodings are listed, and templates are included for compiling Bengali layout tables for OpenType fonts. This document also presents information about the Bengali OpenType shaping engine of Uniscribe, an operating system component responsible for text layout.”

Conversion

  • Unicodify: From Lancaster University, producers of Emille corpus. Includes conversion for AdarshaLipi, AdarshaLipiExp, and AdarshaLipiNormal2 fonts among others. Runs on Windows. Source code available (last updated on the 5th September 2004).
  • Unicode Consortium: FAQ on Indic Scripts and Languages lists these conversion tools:

Transliteration

Data Sources

Monolingual Text

News and portals

* see eThikana: Sutonny under Fonts

Blogs

Parallel Text

Speech

Video

Portals

Tools and Other NLP Resources

  • Bangla in GNU/Linux HOWTO: A document on developing Bengali resources for GNU/Linux, and also about setting locales etc. for Bengali.
  • Bhattacharya, Samit, & Choudhury, Monojit, & Sarkar, Sudeshna, & Basu, Anupam (2005): Inflectional morphology synthesis for Bengali noun, pronoun, and verb systems. National Conference on Computer Processing of Bangla. Independent University, Bangladesh.
  • Dasgupta, Sajib and Vincent Ng (2007). Unsupervised morphological parsing of Bengali. Language Resources and Evaluation 40:3-4, pp. 311-330. Springer. DOI 10.1007/s10579-007-9031-y
  • Faridee, Abu Zaher Md., and Francis M. Tyers. 2009. Development of a morphological analyser for Bengali. In Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Free/Open-Source Rule-Based Machine Translation, 2-3 November 2009, Universitat d’Alacant, Alacant, Spain; ed. Juan Antonio Pérez-Ortiz, Felipe Sánchez-Martínez, Francis M.Tyers; pp. 43-50. PDF, 351KB.
  • Language Technologies Research Centre (LTRC) of the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. “Basic and applied research on various aspects of natural language technology. The focus is on developing technologies in three major areas: Language Access and Machine Translation among English and Indian languages; Speech Processing for Indian languages; Search, Information Extraction and Retrieval for English and Indian languages”
  • Lekho: “a small collection of tools and resources to using bangla on computers... It is still likely (2011) that your computer does not support Bangla "out of the box". In order to read and write Bangla on your computer you will need apropriate fonts and standards aware software.” Links, downloads, information.
  • Part-of-Speech Tagset: Indian Language Part-of-Speech Tagset: Bengali. Kalika Bali, Monojit Choudhury, Priyanka Biswas. 2010. “A corpus developed by Microsoft Research (MSR) India to support the task of Part-of-Speech Tagging (POS) and other data-driven linguistic research on Indian Languages in general. It is created as a part of the Indian Language Part-of-Speech Tagset (IL-POST) project” (LDC catalog #LDC2010T16)


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