| Description | The United Nations recommended system was approved in 1972 (II/11)
and amended in 1977 (III/12), based on a report prepared by D. N.
Sharma. The tables and their corrections were published in volume II of
the conference reports1,2.
There is no evidence of the use of the system either in Bangladesh,
in India or in international cartographic products. The resolution
IV/17 (1982) recommended association, inter alia, with Bangladesh, in
carrying out further studies on the system.
Bengali (Bānglā) uses an alphasyllabic script whereby each character
represents a syllable rather than one sound. Vowels and diphthongs are
marked in two ways: as independent characters (used syllable-initially)
and in an abbreviated form, to denote vowels after consonants. The
romanization table is unambiguous but the user would have to recognize
many ligatures not given in the original table. The system is mostly
reversible but there exist some ambiguities in the romanization of
vowels (independent vs. abbreviated characters) and consonants
(ligatures vs. character sequences).
Other systems of romanization
For differences between the UN system and the ISO transliteration
standard ISO 15919: 2001 see the section on the romanization of Hindi.
References
Second United Nations Conference on the Standardization of
Geographical Names. London, 10–31 May 1972. Vol. II. Technical papers.
United Nations. New York 1974, pp. 139–140.
Third United Nations Conference on the Standardization of
Geographical Names. Athens, 17 August – 7 September 1977. Vol. II,
Technical papers, pp. 393 etc.
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