Discuss Assamese Transliteration

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This page discusses the Assamese transliteration issues. Though it would be wonderful to arrive at a standardized scheme, we should probably not be disheartened if it does not happen.

Transliteration systems like itrans and iitg already exist. So why do we need another scheme?

The itrans system is designed for use with all Indian languages. The iitg system is mainly for the use of Assamese and Manipuri. As a result these systems are not intuitive for a native speaker of Assamese, who quite often writes Assamese on a Roman keyboard. A casual system will encourage the use of the language among those who can speak the language but cannot write it.

Therefore there is a need for a system which is as natural, intuitive and phonetic as possible, which is easy to read, and does not require a priori knowledge of the encoding scheme.

But there is yet another problem with such a system. Assamese spellings are very often not strictly phonetic, guaranteeing that a phonetic system will soon break.

Therefore, we need a loosely phonetic transliteration scheme which has a one-to-one correspondence with a formal accepted system (itrans/iitg), and which will preserve standard Assamese spellings;
but which can degenerate to a casual/intuitive system with just minor modifications, which is easy to write with, and does not require a priori knowledge of the encoding scheme.

The idea is to be able to transform between the formal system and the phonetic system without ambiguity with the help of a computer program based on a map, and transform the casual system to the phonetic system with the help of a spell checker.

We identify the iitg scheme as the formal system, since active work is being done in this system, and a large corpus of work, including reference materials, will be available in this scheme Tezpur University is also working in this area, though the scheme used by them is not available to us.

Finally, we must accept that the new system will not be entirely intuitive, natural or phonetic.

The goal is to use the formal phonetic system on RaizKoox consistently.

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Transliteration Table

N.B An empty cell indicates the entry is the same as the one in the previous column.
N.B If you do not see Assamese letters in the first column, download and install LuitNormal ttf or MuktiNarrow or any other Unicode based Assamese/Bengali fonts.

Asm	itrans	iitg	phonetic1	phonetic2	phonetic3
অ	a
আ	aa
ই	i
ঈ	ii
উ	u
ঊ	uu
ঋ	RRi	R
এ	e
ঐ	ai
ও	o		oo	w
ঔ	au
ক	ka
খ	kha
গ	ga
ঘ	gha
ঙ	~Na	nga
চ	cha	ca	sa
ছ	chha	cha	Sa

Naturalness demands that we use s instead of c here. The use ofcapital S for ditiyo-so ensures that it will degenerate easily to the casual system.

Asm	itrans	iitg	phonetic1	phonetic2	phonetic3
জ	ja
ঝ	jha
ঞ	~na	n'a
ট	Ta
ঠ	Tha
ড	Da
ঢ	Dha
ণ	Na
ত	ta
থ	tha
দ	da
ধ	dha
ন	na
প	pa
ফ	pha
ব	ba
ভ	bha
ম	ma
য	ya		za
ৰ	ra
ল	la
ৱ	va		wa	va
শ	sha	s'a	x'a
ষ	Sha	Sa	Xa
স	sa	sa	xa

The distinguishing sound of these three letters demand that we do not use s for this. For this we use x because (1) it has already been used by many and (2) it corresponds with the IPA letter denoting this sound. Since this is a distinguishing feature of the Assamese language, we should probably adopt this universally.