Brenda Macedo and Sally Giannini

Summer 2000

Introduction
Bengali, or the Eastern New Indo-Aryan language, is the official language of Bangladesh and is spoken by approximately 110 million people.It is also the official regional language of the 55 million or so people living in West Bengal, India.Bengali communities exist in Orissa, Assam, Bihar, Tripura, and Meghalaya. (Campbell)
Bengali was formed from the Magadhi Apabhramsa, between AD 100 and 1200.Texts can be found dating from this period from the esoteric Buddhist-Tantric traditions.These are classified as Old Bengali.Middle Bengali texts included a rich variety of literature on traditional Indian themes, which are remarkable in view of the fact that Bengal was Moslem.In fact, Bengal remained a part of the Mughal Empire until the eighteenth century. (Campbell)
South Asia is dominated by two language families, Indo-Iranian and Dravidian.The Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family extends through much of India. Pakistan, and Bangladesh as well as Sri Lanka and the Himalayan kingdom of Nepal.In India and Pakistan, the Indic languages have come into contact with Dravidian languages from which they have acquired features such as retroflex consonants and strict verb-final order.The Dravidian languages have also borrowed from Indic vocabulary. (Comrie)

Hindustani and Bengali are from the same Indo-Iranian family of languages.Hindustani was promoted by Gandhi as a unifying force in India during the British occupation. (Comrie)

The British take-over in the 19th century added a third strand to an already composite culture.Bengal became the focus of European cultural influence in India, including literary genres, such as the novel. (Comrie)

Modern writing is almost entirely in calitbhasa, which is based upon Calcutta colloquial.The distinction between book language and spoken language persists.Wherever philosophical or scientific terminology is required, there are limitless Sanskrit reservoirs available.There are numerous dialects within the Bengali language; many of them are quite divergent.Until the 20th century, Bengali was written in a heavily Sanskritized book language known as sadhu-bhasa. (Campbell)

Sir William “Orientalâ€? Jones, who identified the Indo-European language family, described Sanskrit as having a “wonderful structure, more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin and more exquisitely refined than either.â€?For example, Latin had six cases.Sanskrit has eight. (Comrie)

Sanskrit means purified.Its cultural significance is similar to Latin, in that it is also the language used for religious purposes.Sanskrit is typically written in the Devanagari script (script of the gods) and contains the root deva. . . as in “divineâ€?.Dating from as early as 1500 BC, the Sanskrit texts represent crucial evidence in the reconstruction of Indo-European.Among the famous works of Sanskrit literature are the Vedas, the epic of the Ramayana and Panini’s writings on grammar. (Comrie)

The Bengali literature is also replete with folklore such as the Songs of Bauls, or wandering minstrels, and the Yatras, the nocturnal celebrations of the Hindu gods and goddesses. (Campbell)

SCRIPT
Bengali script is a cursive script with 12 vowels and 52 consonants and reads from left to right.It is organized according to syllabic rather than segmental units.There is a horizontal line above the characters.There is no distinction between capital and lower case.For further explanation of the script and how it is grouped go to www.it.dtu.dk/~pfw/bengali/info.html.For a Bengali to English translation of the script try www.gl.umbc.edu/~achattl/gif/script/script.gif

PHONOLOGY

Vowels all occur nasalized.Difference in length is not phonemic.‘Vowel raising’ is a characteristic feature of Bengali.
Stress is on the first syllable in citation form and on the head word of a phrase in speech.For more information go to www.it.dtu.dk/~pfw/bengali/sounds.html .
The following table from Comrie shows the Bengali consonants according to the traditional ordering of characters.
The oral vowels and consonants of the standard dialect of Bengali are shown in Comrie’s table below:

MORPHOLOGY

Modern Bengali morphology is very productive for verbs, minimal for nounsand non-existent for adjectives. (Comrie)According to Comrie, “The most interesting area of Bengali morphology is the derivation of inflecting stems from verbal bases.â€?

Four Bengali verbal bases are shown in Comrie’s chart below.

SYNTAX

SOV (subject-object-verb) is the normal word order in Modern Bengali. (Campbell)For example, in English one would say, “I speak Bengaliâ€? and in Bengali, “I Bengali speak.â€?A preposition would fit into the structure thus:SOPV.For example, “I shop to go.â€?According to Comrie, “Bengali has been characterized as a rigidly verb-final language, wherein nominal modifiers precede their heads; verbal modifiers follow verbal bases; the verbal complex is placed sentence-finally; and the subject noun phrase occupies the initial position in a sentence.â€?

Bibliography
Most of the above information was taken from the following two linguistic reference materials.The Campbell material is presented in a briefer form, whereas Comrie goes into much greater detail.

Campbell, George L., Compendium of the World’s Languages, vol. 1, Routledge, London/New York.
Comrie, Bernard, ed., The World’s Major Languages, Oxford University, New York, 1987.
The following might also be helpful for learning more about speaking Bengali.
Beames, John, Grammar of the Bengali Language Literary and Colloquial, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1894.
Dabbs, Jack A., A Short Bengali-English/English-Bengali Dictionary, Texas A & M University, 1971.
Hudson, D. F., Teach Yourself Bengali, English Universities Press, London, 1965.
Klaiman, M. H., Volitionality and Subject in Bengali:A Study of Semantic Parameters in Grammatical Processes, Indiana University Linguistics Club, Bloomington, Indiana, 1981.

Web sites:

www.virtualbangladesh.com/bd_search.html
This is an all-inclusive site and a great starting point.It will give you a tour of the country of Bangladesh as well as transliteration information and actual translations (with sound) into Bengali.This is a wonderful source as it includes links to books, recipes, government, the arts, and much more about the people and language of Bangladesh.

www.cyberbangladesh.org/info.html
This site also is a good starting point as it leads to a variety of links to news profiles, literature, encyclopedias, songs, tourist information, fonts, etc.It also links to Bengali web pages (written in Bengali).

www.travlang.com/languages/cgi-bin/langchoice.cgi
Click on the Bengali flag and to learn travel language.

www.sil.org
This is the site of the Summer Institute of Linguistics.You can order Ethnologue publications either in CD or on-line form that include research and detailed information.This site also sets forth links to specific elements of Linguistics.

www.yourdictionary.com/
You can click on a Bengali dictionary, which provides grammar and fonts.

www.ranainside.com/cgi-bin/first_login.cgi
Go first to this site to register and then proceed to www.ranainside.com/banglasongs to listen to Bangla songs.You need to proper plug-ins to hear the music, which can be downloaded from this site if needed. ( )