a first attempt at writing and transliterating bangla
like with kannada, i decided to learn the bangla alphabet via hindi rather than english because the alphabet and grammar systems are much more similar and i think trying to learn any indic language through english would make it harder for me. i used teach yourself bengali as a reference for the alphabet and pronunciation guide while transliterating the text to devanagari alphabet. the bangla text itself is the very first few lines from this book of short stories (āgunbāṛir kothā?? i don't rly know how half letters work in bangla script yet. but i know kothā means story because this word is used in hindi and kannada too, as katha/kathe).
learning the alphabet by transliterating helps me learn the letters much faster than just memorizing by rote or even writing them generally, because transliterating involves making associations between the unfamiliar letter and a familiar one in different contexts, because the same letter can look different depending on where it's placed in a word. the first time i wrote any letter i would have to make each stroke slowly to check i was writing it correctly, but each consecutive time i got faster. for a few of the letters, i memorized them immediately after this exercise; some because they resembled their devanagari counterparts (ও उ, ঔ ऊ, ক क, ন न, থ थ, ল ल), and some because they appeared frequently in the sample text (অ, আ, গ, ছ, হ, স, ম).
the main thing that i'm struggling to grasp in bangla pronunciations is the inherent vowel. the first indic language i learned was hindi which has a mid central vowel, or schwa (ə) as it's inherent vowel. this is pronounced kind of like 'uh'. the hindi accent also has a tendency to flatten and sometimes shorten vowels in loanwords from other languages. many good examples can be found in farsi loanwords, if you hear the iranian pronunciation of these words, the vowels sound rounded and open, the same words in hindi tend to be pronounced more flat and with less length. these pronunciation habits have influenced how i approach vowel sounds, and i find it awkward to pronounce vowels that are more rounded because i'm not used to it. reading a word like কথা, i instinctively pronounce it katha rather than kotha because i'm not yet used to the o inherent vowel. i have the same issue with my farsi pronunciations, where i tend to flatten the rounded a vowels, saying words like 'man' (من) as 'mun' and 'khūbam' (خوبم) as 'khūbum'.
for the writing of the letters itself, many of them were close enough to devanagari that i got the hang of them pretty quickly. something i didn't realize is that in bangla the top line, or shiro rekha, is written after each letter, while the way i learned to write devanagari was to write the letters minus each of their horizontal rekhas and then line the whole word at the end. it makes me wonder if that's how other people also write devanagari or if everyone writes the line differently.
these are the words i recognized without having to look them up!
