
If a vowel is not attached to a consonant, the consonant may be pronounced with an inherent “ɔ” sound (similar as to the “o” in English “on”). In the romanization, consonants without an “h” are usually unaspirated.

For example, chh is छ in Devanagari, but ছ in Bengali. In addition, many letters don’t look similar at all. For example, the letter m in Devanagari is written as म, but in Bengali it is ম. The trick is to look beneath the matra: Devanagari is often blockier, while Bengali is wavier. You might think those two alphabets are the same, but there are many differences, like those between the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. It is similar to Devanagari, the script used in Hindi and Nepali, because a horizontal line called a matra (মাত্রা) connects letters together into one word. Like Thai and Hindi, it is a Brahmic script. The Bengali alphabet, also known as the Bangla alphabet and the Bengali-Assamese alphabet, is used to write Bengali, Assamese, and sometimes Sanskrit.

Consonant Clusters in the Bengali Alphabet.How to Read Consonants without Vowel Marks.
