Number of letters in bengali alphabet full#
Vowel signs are attached to consonants except at the beginning of words and syllables, where the full vowel is written. Bengali has a great number of conjunct letters that combine, in one symbol, two or more consonants or consonant–vowel clusters. There are 12 vowels or diphthongs, two semivowels, and almost 40 consonants. Writing is from left to right and is syllabic. Thompson, in Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (Second Edition), 2006 Orthography and Phonologyīengali is written in a variant of the Devanagari script, which is related to but distinct from the script used for Sanskrit and Hindi. Since the incidence of the Panjabi tones is largely predictable, their historical Gurmukhi spelling is only partially comparable to the more elaborate adaptations of the Indic writing system to write the fully tonal languages of Southeast Asia that are considered in section ‘Tonal Scripts’ below. It may also be noted that the number of Panjabi consonant phonemes is reduced from the usual Indo-Aryan set by the reduction of voiced aspiration to tone, so written Gurmukhi 〈ghoṛā〉 ‘horse’ is realized as 〈k'òṛā〉 with partial devoicing and low-rising tone. The number of letters is also reduced, to 35 as compared to the 43 in Nagari, through the reduction of the basic vowel letters to three and the absence of consonant letters distinguished only for Sanskrit and in place of the consonant clusters that swell the graphic inventory of most Indian scripts, Gurmukhi adds to its basic consonant letters only a few subscript marks, to indicate - r and - h (and a rarely used - v). A modern Gurmukhi refinement, doubtless inspired by the Arabic tashdīd used in Urdu orthography, indicates such doubling by a superscript semicircle ( addhik), but its use remains erratic. The doubled consonants so generally retained from Middle Indo-Aryan in Panjabi (unlike most New Indo-Aryan languages) are thus indicated as in Brahmi by writing a single consonant versus the clusters obligatory in Nagari, so Panjabi 〈makhan〉 = makkhan ‘butter’ versus Hindi 〈makkhan〉. Although the letter shapes of the Gurmukhi script are similar to those of Nagari, its organization is generally closer to the original model of Brahmi than to the classicized norms of Nagari with their insistence on the special writings of consonant groups as graphic clusters.
The most successful survivor of this group is the Gurmukhi script ( Shackle, 2003: 594–598), which has sacred associations with their scriptures (Panjabi gurmukhī ‘belonging to the Guru-guided ones’) to the Sikhs, and which is today the standard script for writing Panjabi in India. Now mostly obsolete, these semi-learned scripts once included the Kaithi script associated with the scribal Kayasth caste of northern India ( Grierson, 1899), the Khojki script of the Khoja Ismaili Muslims of western India ( Shackle and Moir, 1992: 34–42), and the Hindu-Sindhi script abortively promulgated by the British in the late 19th century. There was also formerly in existence a category of fully voweled scripts, again particularly well represented in the northwest, which might be termed ‘semi-learned’ in view of their intermediate typological position between these commercial shorthands on the one hand and the learned northern scripts of the Nagari type on the other. Like most shorthands, they are accordingly easier to write quickly than to read accurately, hence the proverbial misreading of graphic 〈bb 'jmrgy bṛbh bhj djy〉, i.e., bābā ajmēr gayā baṛī bahī bhēj dījiyē ‘the “master has gone to Ajmer, send the big ledger,’ as bābā āj mar gayā baṛī bahū bhēj dījiyē ‘the master died today, send the chief wife!’ ( Grierson, 1899: 3).
Best exemplified for the northwest ( Leitner, 1883), these characteristically dispense with most modifying vowel signs, although vowel letters are sometimes erratically inserted as matres lectionis. This is chiefly exemplified by the commercial shorthands ( Figure 4), generically labeled ‘Mahajani’ (Hindi mahājanī ‘mercantile’), which are now increasingly obsolete, but which were formerly used for many centuries as business and revenue scripts in a great variety of regional forms. Before turning to the description of Nagari, the most important modern Indian script, and the one that most fully exemplifies the implications of the Sanskritization of Indian writing, attention may be drawn to a less commonly noticed development in the opposite direction of simplification.