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elcome
to the Literary section of the Prabasi Web pages. The literary section has the following sections.
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Shankha Vishwajanin |
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Bengali Transliteration System |
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Table of Bengali Symbols with English equivalent |
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Examples of Bengali Transliteration |
Shankha Vishwajanin
Shankha Vishwajanin - The internet version of Prabasi's print magazine Shankha is now online. Check it out! The shortcut address is http://www.prabasi.org/Shankha.
Bengali Transliteration
For the first time ever on the Internet, we had introduced the Bengali Transliteration System which enabled you to transliterate any text written in English to Bengali without having to install any fonts. The response to the beta system was phenomenal and it has become the most popular page on our site. Well, there have been a number of suggestions and finally we are ready with Version 1.0 of the system which is a vastly improved system over its predecessor. The new features are:
- You can write Bengali text seamlessly (without inserting hyphens).
- The English letters are case in-sensitive now.
- Matching is done by regular-expressions which is faster than before.
- You can embed HTML tags in between, thus making it a good publishing starter-kit.
- Difficult words can be spelled individually by inserting hyphens as before.
- You can Email your composition to one or more people who will notified by regular Email and then be able to see their mail in Bengali by clicking on a URL.
- You can print your composition in Bengali by just clicking a button.
- You can embed English text within Bengali by inserting it between curly braces.
- You may save your composition and then retrieve it later by using a file name. Retrieval can be done from any location. Thus you may work on your composition in several sessions from several locations.
- We have followed a modified form of the Suniti Kumar alphabet set based on a study done in India in 1960 for using Roman alphabets for Indian languages. Consequently the mapping of characters from the beta version has changed. We hope our old users will appreciate that the change is going to be beneficial in the long run.
In case you haven't seen the system yet, all you do is type your English text inside a form following some simple rules and get a transliterated Bengali output. You can preview your composition instantly using our system. Once you are satisfied with your composition, you just press the Submit button and it is done. In short, you are just one step away from submitting your own article on the Internet.
ince
most of us are conversant in English and can write "baan`laa" in English fairly well, we can now, through
the use of modern languages like Javascript 1.2 and new technology like Dynamic Fonts, parse your
text, transliterate it to another font, and display it online for your immediate perusal. The above example would
transliterate into h¡wm¡. This way you can check your composition
as you go along. It is the simplest way to write Bengali on the English keyboard. Most important of all, now everybody
has access to this unique system since it is on the Internet!
To use this system all you need is Netscape Communicator 4.0. If you do not have it, get it now from Netscape's Site, it's free. You do not need any special fonts on your system because the font information is embedded inside the HTML code. This technology works regardless of the operating system, Windows, UNIX or Mac OS. Internet Explorer users would need to install the Bengali fonts.
