Conventions Regarding Transliteration and Nomenclature

Perhaps more than any other north Indian vernacular, transliterating Bangla into Roman script is an exercise in frustration because orthography and pronunciation diverge so dramatically. One must choose an approach commensurate to the material. That, together with the tendency of Bangla to resort selectively to apocope, inevitably leads to inconsistencies. Orthography in Bangla has always been fluid.1 The printing press is assumed to have standardized Bangla orthography, as was often the case in other parts of the world, and this seems to be the case within certain genres, such as the novel, which emerged in the late nineteenth century. But orthography and spellings have never been truly stable, as the texts in this study make clear. Even now, after the advent of digital printing and spell-checking dictionaries, change and inconsistencies abound.2 These issues of orthography and spelling are doubly exacerbated in the materials used in the present study because