It is written from left to right and lacks distinct letter cases. its vowel graphemes are mainly realized not as independent letters, but as diacritics attached to its consonant letters. Historically, the script has also been used to write the Sanskrit language in the region of Bengal.įrom a classificatory point of view, the Bengali script is an abugida, i.e.

The script is shared by Assamese with minor variations, and is the basis for the other writing systems like Meithei and Bishnupriya Manipuri. The Bengali alphabet or Bangla alphabet is the writing system for the Bengali language and is the 6th most widely used writing system in the world. The Devanagari, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil 0B80–0BFF, Telugu 0C00–0C7F, Kannada 0C80–0CFF, and Malayalam 0D00–0D7F blocks were similarly all based on ISCII encodings. In its original incarnation, the code points U+0981.U+09CD were a direct copy of the Bengali characters A1-ED from the 1988 ISCII standard, as well as several Assamese ISCII characters in the U+09F0 column.

We conclude that the idiosyncratic features of MJ's synesthesia reflect unique properties of the Bengali writing system, that more studies of synesthesia in non-alphabetic scripts are needed, and that synesthetic phenomenology can offer insights into how linguistic properties shape grapheme representation in the brain.Bengali is a Unicode block containing characters for the Bengali, Assamese, Bishnupriya Manipuri, Daphla, Garo, Hallam, Khasi, Mizo, Munda, Naga, Rian, and Santali languages. Finally, we show that in addition to these language-specific features, MJ's synesthetic associations are influenced by some of the same linguistic properties (such as orthography and phonology) that influence synesthetic associations in other languages. Second, we describe and analyze the complex synesthetic experiences reported by MJ for conjunct graphemes, a unique orthographic feature of Brahmi-derived scripts (such as Bengali) in which multiple graphemes are visually combined into a single 'merged' grapheme. First, we show that for MJ, diacritics influence the overall color of the consonant grapheme they modify, 'pulling' it toward the color she experiences for the vowel. Here, we present a case study of a Bengali synesthete, MJ, the first report of a grapheme-color synesthete in an abugida. In particular, grapheme-color synesthesia in an abugida (a segmental writing system in which vowels are added to consonant graphemes using 'accent'-like diacritical marks) has never been studied. Most studies of grapheme-color synesthesia have only examined synesthetes in English, leaving underexplored the question of how synesthetic phenomenology might differ in languages that do not use alphabets.

Grapheme-color synesthetes experience graphemes (e.g., letters of the alphabet) as having a specific, consistent color.

Abugida bengali alphabet