Bengali language History, Writing System & Dialects

The productive vocabulary used in modern literary works, is made up mostly (67 percent) of tôdbhôbo words, while tôtshômo only make up 25 percent of the total. A large proportion of these 100,000 words are archaic or highly technical, minimizing their actual usage. Bengali has as many as 100,000 separate words, of which 50,000 (67 percent) are considered tôtshômo (direct reborrowings from Sanskrit), 21,100 (28 percent) are tôdbhôbo (derived from Sanskrit words), and the rest are bideshi (foreign) and deshi words. Non-finite verbs have no inflection for tense or person, while finite verbs are fully inflected for person (first, second, third), tense (present, past, future), aspect (simple, perfect, progressive), and honor (intimate, familiar, and formal), but not for number.

Yes–no questions do not require any change to the basic word order; instead, the low (L) tone of the final syllable in the utterance is replaced with a falling (HL) tone. However, nouns and pronouns are moderately https://bdcrazytime.com/bd/strategy/ declined (altered depending on their function in a sentence) into four cases while verbs are heavily conjugated, and the verbs do not change form depending on the number of the noun. The most recent attempt has been by publishers Mitra and Ghosh with the launch of three popular children’s books, Abol Tabol, Hasi Khusi and Sahoj Path, in Roman script at the Kolkata Book Fair 2018.

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In Sylhet and Bankura, modified versions of the Kaithi script had some historical prominence, mainly among Muslim communities. Small numbers of people in Midnapore, which borders Odisha, have used the Odia script to write in Bengali. Bengali punctuation marks, apart from the downstroke । daṛi – the Bengali equivalent of a full stop – have been adopted from Western scripts and their usage is similar.

These symbols do not, however, always represent the spoken sound of the language. He dispensed with ঋ and ৯৯ and placed anusvara (ং) and visarga (ঃ) at the end of the consonant section of the alphabet and introduced ড়, ঢ় and ৎ. The new loans are from Persian, Arabic, English, Portuguese and other languages.

• In these consonant-vowel ligatures, the so-called “inherent” vowel ɔ is first expunged from the consonant before adding the vowel, but this intermediate expulsion of the inherent vowel is not indicated in any visual manner on the basic consonant sign ম mɔ.
• Rajbangsi, Kharia Thar and Mal Paharia are closely related to Western Bengali dialects, but are typically classified as separate languages.
• Bengali punctuation marks, apart from the downstroke । daṛi – the Bengali equivalent of a full stop – have been adopted from Western scripts and their usage is similar.
• The new loans are from Persian, Arabic, English, Portuguese and other languages.

Verbs

Sanskrit distinguishes between a consonant ব (b) and a semi-vowel ভ (v). If the basic ড (d) of Sanskrit falls within or at the end of a Bangla word, the sound is pronounced ড় (d). Some vowels are nasalised, changing the meaning and import of the word; for instance, the pronunciation of the honorific pronoun for third person is the nasalised তাঁর (tanr), clearly distinguishing the pronoun from the third person general তার (tar). However, as in the case of many languages of the Indo-Aryan family, অ (a) at the end of syllables in Bangla often disappears. As in Sanskrit, every independent consonant syllable has the inherent vowel অ (a), unless another vowel is specified. At some points in history, Bangla was written in Perso-Arabic script and sylheti nagri.

The 20th century witnessed the elevation of colloquial Bangla to a written literary medium through the work of many talented writers such as rabindranath tagore and pramatha chowdhury. During the 19th century, the efforts of Bengali writers contributed to the further growth of the language. With the start of British rule in the 18th century and the spread of English education, Bangla started absorbing increasing numbers of English words. In the 16th century, with the Portuguese inroads, several Portuguese words entered Bangla; for example, words such as anaras (pineapple), ata (custard-apple) and tamak (tobacco). Because of this special status as well as other cultural influences, Bangla picked up many Persian words at this time.