Bengali/Bengali

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Revision as of 17:38, 3 May 2011

Home > Bengali

General

Language summary

(Information from Ethnologue, 2009-05-13)

• ISO 639-3 code: ben
• Spoken in: Western Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and diaspora
• Population: 100,000,000 in Bangladesh (1994 UBS). 211,000,000 including second-language speakers (1999 WA). Population total all countries: 171,070,202.
• Alternate names: Banga-Bhasa, Bangala, Bangla
• Dialects: Languages or dialects in the Bengali group according to Grierson (1903-1928): Central (Standard) Bengali, Western Bengali (Kharia Thar, Mal Paharia, Saraki), Southwestern Bengali, Northern Bengali (Koch, Siripuria), Rajbanshi, Bahe, Eastern Bengali (East Central, including Sylhetti), Haijong, Southeastern Bengali (Chakma), Ganda, Vanga, Chittagonian (possible dialect of Southeastern Bengali).
• Classification: Indo-European, Indo-Iranian, Indo-Aryan, Eastern zone, Bengali-Assamese
• Script: Bengali

Linguistic notes

Morphology

Bengali marks plural by means of several different suffixes, the choice depending on the noun, and several cases, again by means of several different suffixes.

Writing System

Bengali is written in a Brahmi derivative, with ligatures, and with vowel markers located in various positions around the consonant.

• Omniglot
• Wikipedia: Bengali script (CC-BY-SA),(GFDL)
• Bengali script notes [Draft], Richard Ishida. [Last update 2005-02-04]

Linguistic resources

• 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

• Akhor: 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.
• 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. ISBN 8173043418. Reprint. USD 7.75.
  • Also: 1961, 1291 pp. Calcutta: S.C. Mazumder.
• Digital Dictionaries of South Asia at the University of Chicago:
  • Biswas Bengali
  • Biswas Bengali-English
  • Dasa Bengali beta
• 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.
• Virtual Bangladesh: Dictionary: On-line lexicon, claims 3k words. Results are displayed in a romanization and “often” in Bangla script using a Unicode font. “The dictionary is still work in progress.”
• Wiktionary. Unicode. Monolingual. 21,347 entries. (CC-BY-SA),(GFDL) [Mamandel 16:27, 3 May 2010 (UTC)]

Topical word lists

[Mamandel 16:40, 3 May 2011 (UTC)]

• Pandanus Database of Indian Plants: “146” names of Indian plants in Bengali, five other Indian languages (all in romanization), English, and Latin.

  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. {{si

• 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 baby names in Roman transliteration

Phrasebooks

• Bengali Script
  • http://www.bengalitranslator.net/ENGLISH_WORDS_PHRASES_INTO%20BENGALI/index.html
• Roman transliteration
  • travlang.com: transliteration with sound files

Writing

• Bagchi, Tista (1996): "Bengali Writing," in William Bright and Peter Daniels (eds.) The World's Writing Systems. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 399-403. ISBN 0-19-507993-0.

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.
• Butt, Miriam (2001): "Case, agreement, pronoun incorporation, and pro-drop in South Asian languages," handout for talk presented at the workshop The Role of Agreement in Argument Structure, August 31-September 1, 2001, Utrecht.
• Dirdal, Hildegunn: "The acquisition of articles by Bengali learners of English". Handout
• 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.
• 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.

• Constable, Peter (2004): Encoding of Bengali Khanda Ta in Unicode. Unicode Consortium Public Review Issue #30.
• Pennsylvania State University information page.
  • Penn State chart of Unicode Entity Codes for the Bengali (Bangla) Script (including OS X and Windows keyboard entry)
• White, Andy. (2003). Exnet. Template:Heavy quotes (Last updated 10th March 2003)

ISCII

See ISCII.

Sutonny

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

ITRANS and CS/CSX

ITRANS is a transliteration package, no longer supported but still available. 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. Twelve Unicode fonts.
• 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
• Penn State University. (2009.) Browser and Font Recommendations for Bengali. Also information on Setup for Keyboarding.
• Rezaul: The site is a portal of sorts; this directory has links to fonts and encoding documentation.
• 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. Creating and supporting OpenType fonts for the Bengali script: Microsoft doc on Unicode 3.1 for Bengali. Template:Heavy quotes

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).

• Unicode Consortium: FAQ on Indic Scripts and Languages lists these conversion tools:
  • Microsoft's Visual OpenType Layout Tool (VOLT)
  • Apple's Font Tools
  • Adobe's Font Development Kit
  • Pyrus' FontLab
  • PFAEDIT (X-11-based, for Mac OSX, Cygwin, etc.) (for the Linux OS)

Transliteration

• ALA-LC Transliteration Table (American Library Assn. - Library of Congress)
• ITRANS 5.30: Chopde, Avinash. Uses ItxBeng 8-bit font. No longer supported but still available [Accessed 2009-09-5]. Template:Heavy quotes [domain, aczoom.com, was formerly www.aczone.com]

Data Sources

Monolingual Text

• EMILLE corpus. Free license for non-profit research use. Approximately 5,520,000 words. Documentation
• Wikipedia. Unicode. 22,250 articles. (CC-BY-SA),(GFDL) [Mamandel 17:38, 3 May 2011 (UTC)]

News and portals

• Newspaper portals:
  • India Press
  • Virtual Bangladesh: Newspapers

• BBC
• Bhorerkagoj (Sutonny encoding*)
• China Radio International, Bengali
• The Daily Amadershomoy (Sutonny encoding*)
• Daily Jugantor (Sutonny encoding*)
• Deutsche Welle Bengali
• Inqilab
• Ittefaq (Sutonny encoding*)
• The Jaijaidin (Sutonny encoding*)
• Janakantha
• Manabzamin (Sutonny encoding*)
• NHK in Bengali
• Prathom-Alo (Unicode, but see note*)
• UKBD News (UK and Bangladesh)

* see Bangla.com: Sutonny under Fonts

Blogs

• Banglablogs: Blog portal. Some of the blogs are in Bengali, some in English.
• Banglapundit: “This blog is open to invited readers only ...you might want to contact the blog author and request an invitation.”

Parallel Text

• In Defence of Marxism: Argentina - The Revolution has begun. Approx 13 pg article: Bengali, English
• Bangladesh Awami League: A pair of parallel articles: Bengali (unknown encoding) and English.
• Bangla Proverbs
• Bengali in GNU/Linux HOWTO; Bangla Translation
• Colonel Taher: commemorating a colonel in Bangladesh war of independence; some political and news content. Bengali is in Unicode. English is not as complete as Bengali.
• EMILLE corpus. 200,000 words of text in English (information leaflets from the UK Government and various local authorities) with Bengali translation. Free license for non-profit research use.
• W3C documents: translation of "Quick Tips to Make Accessible Web Sites"; very small

Speech

• EMILLE corpus. Free license for non-profit research use. 442,000 words from radio broadcasts, plus Template:Heavy quotes
• BBC.
• VOA [110422 mam]

Portals

• Bangla
• Bangladesh-America
• Bengali Language Directory
• Bombay History
• Virtual Bangladesh
• Cyber Bangladesh: a variety of links to news profiles, literature, encyclopedias, songs, tourist information, fonts, etc.
• University of Cambridge International Examinations website
  • Periodicals to support O Level Bengali
  • Language Skills Practice to support O Level Bengali: Suggested resources for teachers to support the delivery of the syllabus
  • http://www.Bangladesh.net
  • http://www.bbc.co.uk/bengali/
  • http://www.indiamatch.com

Tools and Other NLP Resources

• Ankur: Project to support Bengali, mostly on XServer but some on GNU Linux. [Page last updated 2006-08-17; accessed 2009-04-20]
  Includes
  • OpenOffice 2.0
  • Bengali word list with over 100,000 words for GNU Aspell
  • bspeller: Template:Heavy quotes; runs under Linux. (The spell checker uses the Gnu Aspell program, and might be runnable as a stand-alone.)
• 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.
• Lekho: Bengali Unicode text editor, runs under UNIX and MS Windows.
• Part-of-Speech Tagset: Indian Language Part-of-Speech Tagset: Bengali. Kalika Bali, Monojit Choudhury, Priyanka Biswas. 2010. LDC2010T16. “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” [Mamandel 20:41, 1 March 2011 (UTC)]