Bengali/Bengali

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Home > Bengali

বাংলা


BENGALI


[Mamandel 17:48, 3 May 2011 (UTC)]

Contents

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.

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

Topical word lists

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

Names
  • Babynology: List of Bengali baby names in Roman transliteration

Phrasebooks

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.

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. “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).

Transliteration

Data Sources

Monolingual Text

News and portals

* 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

Speech

  • EMILLE corpus. Free license for non-profit research use. 442,000 words from radio broadcasts, plus “small amounts of demographically-sampled speech”
  • BBC.
  • VOA [110422 mam]

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” [Mamandel 17:58, 3 May 2011 (UTC)]
    • Archive of papers and keynote lectures from ICON-2008 thru 2010 (6th thru 8th International Conference on Natural Language Processing, IIT Kharagpur)
    • Tools: Shallow Parser for Hindi; Hindi WordNet
  • 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)]
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