Bengali Alphabet - Description of Bengali Glyphs - Consonant Conjuncts

Consonant Conjuncts

Up to four consecutive consonants not separated by vowels can be orthographically represented as a ligature called a "consonant conjunct" (Bengali: যুক্তাক্ষর juktakkhor or যুক্তবর্ণ juktobôrno). Typically, the first consonant in the conjunct is shown above and/or to the left of the following consonants. Many consonants appear in an abbreviated or compressed form when serving as part of a conjunct. Others simply take exceptional forms in conjuncts, bearing little or no resemblance to the base character.

Often, consonant conjuncts are not actually pronounced as would be implied by the pronunciation of the individual components. For example, adding ল lô underneath শ shô in Bengali creates the conjunct শ্ল, which is not pronounced shlô but slô in Bengali. Many conjuncts represent Sanskrit sounds that were lost centuries before modern Bengali was ever spoken, as in জ্ঞ, which is a combination of জ jô and ঞ niô, but is not pronounced jnô. Instead, it is pronounced ggõ in Bengali. Thus, as conjuncts often represent (combinations of) sounds that cannot be easily understood from the components, the following descriptions are concerned only with the construction of the conjunct, and not the resulting pronunciation. Thus, a variant of the IAST romanization scheme is used instead of the phonemic romanization.