ISO 15919 Bengali transliteration

The auxiliary Roman alphabet for Bengali, which the ‘ISO 15919 Transliteration of Devanagari and related Indic scripts into Latin characters’ lays out, closely follows the Bengali orthography.

The ISO 15919 scheme provides for both print, or diacritic, and 7-bit ASCII transliteration. The first line has the Bengali characters, the second has the diacritic scheme and the third has 7-bit ASCII (ISO 464 repertoire) scheme.

Vowels

Consonants

Principles

• the scheme is case-insensitive but uses the lowercase characters for a legibility.
• the inherent a (অ) is always transliterated even when this is not pronounced or nullified by a hasanta or virama, or this pronounces as ‘ও’ /o/ with ‘ই’ or ‘উ’ going in the next syllables.
• the inherent vowel a is suppressed to form consonants with the next consonant. If no conjunct and a hasanta are intended, a colon (:) is inserted the hasanta-consonant; the colon appear for a hasanta: tta (ত্ত) and t:ta (ৎত).
• a colon (:) is used to disambiguate any cluster formation, such as bai (বৈ) and ba:i (বই) or ārya (আর্য), r:yāpāra (র‍্যাপার) or a:yā (অ্যা).
• ya-phala is always y but after ya, when it is ẏẏ.
• candrabindu is always a tilde over vowels, the first vowel in cases of ai and au.
• for numerals, Latin characters are used.
• word divisions are shown with spaces in compliance with the original orthography.

Technical point

The character e and o are in effect long, to be coded ē (ee) and ō (oo); their short counterparts are absent in Bengali, making them unambiguous. But if it is de rigour to maintain uniformity (among other Indic schemes), the characters should be considered long, and coded doubled.

Extended characters

There are some extensions to the Bengali characters used in the transliteration of words from other languages. The ISO 15919 proposal draft dealt with various options.

qa   Perso-Arabic qaaf (ق)
_kha Perso-Arabic khaa' (خ)
.ga  Perso-Arabic ghayn (غ)
za   Perso-Arabic dhaal (ذ), zaa' (ز), zhaa' (ژ),
     Daad (ض), Dhaa' (ظ)
fa   Perso-Arabic faa' (ف), English f
wa   Perso-Arabic waaw (و), English w

Rev.: vii·xi·mmxxii