While different standards for romanisation have been proposed for Bengali, none has been adopted with the same degree of uniformity as Japanese or Sanskrit.
Portuguese missionaries stationed in Bengal in the 16th century were the first people to employ the Latin alphabet in writing Bengali books.
At the same time, Nathaniel Brassey Halhed used a romanisation scheme based on English for his Bengali grammar book.
After Halhed, the renowned English philologist and oriental scholar Sir William Jones devised a romanisation scheme for Bengali and other Indian languages in general; he published it in the Asiatick Researches journal in 1801.
[5] Abul Fazal Muhammad Akhtaru-d-Din, in an article titled "Bangla Bornomalar Poribortton" (বাংলা বর্ণমালার পরিবর্ত্তন, Changes in the Bengali Alphabet) published in Daily Azad on April 18, 1949, said, Rabindranath Tagore once advocated the Roman alphabet for Bengali, but later he changed his opinion.
[6][5] After 1947, many other East Pakistani academics, including Muhammad Qudrat-i-Khuda and Nazirul Islam Mohammad Sufian, supported the idea of writing Bengali in Roman script.
The distinction is important in Bengali, as its orthography was adopted from Sanskrit and ignores several millennia of sound change.
Even simple words like মন "mind" may be pronounced "mon", "môn", or (in poetry) "mônô" (as in the Indian national anthem, "Jana Gana Mana").
Thus, the vowel এ can represent either [e] (এল elo [elɔ] "came") or [ɛ] (এক êk [ɛk] "one").
A phenomenon in which romanisation of Bengali unintentionally leads to humorous results when translated is known as Murad Takla.
Schemes such as the Harvard-Kyoto one are more suited for ASCII-derivative keyboards and use upper- and lower-case letters contrastively, so forgo normal standards for English capitalisation.
A detailed example is given below by the lyrics of the "Amar Sonar Bangla" as written by Rabindranath Tagore, the first ten lines of this song currently constitute Bangladesh's national anthem.
Ō ma, phagune tōr amer bone ghrane pagol kore, Mori hay, hay re: Ō ma, Oghrane tōr bhora khete ami ki dekhechi modhur hashi.
Tōmar ei khelaghore shishukal kaṭile re, Tōmari dhulamaṭi ongge makhi dhonno jibon mani.