Roman-to-Bengali Conversion Rules

Let us start with an example :

Go through the following steps to produce the correct input to the converter :

Step 1 : Transliterate into English
Bangla ekti sundar bhasa.
Write your Bengali sentences in English so that somebody who reads this text and who knows that this is Bengali, may correctly decode it. For human readers this is in most cases sufficient. Unfortunately Bengali Writer is not intelligent. More precisely, it does not "know" Bengali. It has to be input the text in the correct format. So you have to go through the remaining steps.

Step 2 : Remove unnecessary upper-case letters
bangla ekti sundar bhasa.
You may not start a sentence with an upper-case letter. Note that Bengali Writer is case sensitive.

Step 3 : Use proper symbols for swarabarna's (vowels)
baanglaa ekti sundar bhaasaa.
Bengali Writer distinguishes between "a" and "aa". You should write the proper symbol for the swarabarno that conforms to the spelling. For details, see below.

Step 4 : Use proper symbols for banjonbarno's (consonants)
baanglaa ekTi ssundar bhaasaa.
Again use the proper symbol for the desired consonant. In our example, "t" is to be replaced by "T" to distinguish between the hard t ("T") and the soft t ("t"). Similarly, the "s" in "sundar" is to be replaced by "ss" so that it outputs the correct spelling, namely "danto-s". Details follow.

Step 5 : Use separators
baang_laa ek_Ti ssundar bhaasaa.
Put an underscore ("_") to separate two successive swar's without a banjon in between as well as to separate two successive banjon's without a swar in between. Here "ekTi" should be replaced by "ek_Ti".

Step 6 : Mark the juktakkhar's (compound consonants)
baang_laa ek_Ti ssu<nd>ar bhaasaa.
Confine all the juktakkhar's to appear in your output by a pair of angular brackets. You may use the angular brackets also to delimit a swarabarno (not the symbol for it when it is compounded with a banjonbarno) placed NOT at the beginning of a word. For example, "ba_i" and "ba<i>" give the same output, namely a book.

And that's it. You are done !!! Isn't it simple ? I hope that you are now quite sure of what to do and how to do. There are, however, some topics that need further elaboration.

Swarabarno's :

Swarabarno's (vowels) and their symbols (which Bengalees call kaar's, e.g., a-kaar, aa-kaar, i-kaar etc.) are written in the same way. If a word begins with a swarabarno, it has to be the vowel itself, and not its symbol (as e in ek_Ti). However if a vowel sound comes not at the beginning of a word, it is treated as its symbol (kaar), unless you specify the otherwise as illustrated in Step 6 above. For a complete list of vowel sounds, click here.

Banjonbarno's :

A complete list of consonants can be found here. Note how the different s's, different n's and different j's are encoded. Also see the difference between the T-bargo (T, Th, D, Dh, N) and the t-bargo (t, th, d, dh, n).

Juktakkhar's :

A juktakkhar is a sequence of consonants without vowels in between and written as a single symbol. A list of juktakkhar's that do not include a ref or a ja-fala is listed here. Note that the ref's and ja-fala's are written in a similar way. For example, a sentence is a "baa<ky>a", it's meaning is "a<rth>a". And a gift is an "a<rghy>a".

Numbers :

Use the English digits to denote numbers in Bengali. For example, if you like to mention the price of your new colorful T-shirt in your document, write "175 Taakaa".

Punctuation symbols and formatting :

Use the same punctuation symbols as in English ( . , " ? - ( ) ! : / ). You may not put a "|" to specify a period. Formatting is done by your web-browser. You can specify a line-break by a back-slash (\) and a space by a tilde (~).

Inserting English texts :

You can insert English texts in your document by the <ENG> command. When you like to revert to Bengali fonts, type </ENG>. Whatever you write between these two tags go directly to the output without any modification. Hence this text should be in the HTML format. All HTML tags in this text are interpreted by your web-browser in the usual way. Thus you can create links, import images and do similar things as you do when you prepare your homepage.
Note :
1. The tags should be as mentioned above. You may not change the case of any of the letters appearing between the angular brackets. Thus, for example, <Eng> is not a valid tag for starting the English mode.
2. The tags <ENG> and </ENG> have to be both preceded and followed by a white character (a carriage return or a space or a tab). I recommend you to write each tag in a line containing no other text.
3. You may consult an example.

A longer example

Now it's time that you may

try it yourself.


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