LANGUAGE

Bangla - evsjv

An Indo-Aryan language, Bangla is a member of the Indo-European branch of languages, and like English is witten from left to right. It is spoken by 207 million people, the fourth highest number of speakers in the world. The Bangla alphabet is derived from the Brahmi alphabet. It is also closely related to the Devanagari alphabet, from which it started to diverge in the 11th century AD. The current printed form of the Bangla alphabet first appeared in 1778 when Charles Wilkins developed printing in Bangla. The version of Bangla used in the dialogues and exercises in the lessons is the dialect spoken in Bangladesh. The language spoken in West Bengal has minor differences in pronoun usage, verb conjugation, and vocabulary choice.

1. The Bengali alphabet is a syllabic alphabet, where consonants have an inherent vowel, which has two different pronunciations (aw, o), the choice of which is not always easy to determine and which is sometimes not pronounced at all.  The latter is sometimes indicated with a hasanto, but in most cases no sign is given to indicate a stop. In the text, for transcribing foreign/Latin words into the Bangla alphabet, hasanto has been used for some words. The consonant sounds are arranged in Table II, according to the traditional Indian arrangement. Columns 1 and 3 are unaspirated stops, and some of these sounds are unfamiliar to speakers of only American English, e.g., k, c, T, t, p.

2. Vowels can be written as independent letters, or by using a variety of diacritical marks which are written above, below, before or after the consonants they belong to, as shown in Table I.

3. When consonants occur together in clusters, special conjunct letters are used. The inherent vowel only applies to the final consonant. There are numerous conjuncts, and only a few used in the lessons are shown in Table IV. A few combinations of consonants and vowels are depicted with special symbols, as shown in Table V.

Some Notes on Romanization 

The romanization used in the lessons is not according to the rules prescribled by the IPA, International Phonetic Associaton, since they require special symbols. The alphabets were romanized based on what would seem intuitively natural to pronounce for a native English speaker. Example: to depict the inherent vowel in Bangla consonants, aw was chosen instead of o or au.

The romanization of the alphabets is given in Table I and Table II below.  The romanization of the velar and palatal nasals in Table II are approximations. The various vowel sounds are given in Table III.

In Table I, since the two i’s and two u’s are pronounced the same in Bangla, i and u are used to denote them respectively. However, in the text, sometimes ee is used to denote i, as romanizing with an i would make the pronunciation too abrupt.

In Table II, the two r’s, i and o, are not distinguished in the romanization, as speakers seldom distinguish the two in Bangladesh. The two s’s, k and l, are pronounced the same, but m can be similar or different. e.g.,  mvZ, shat; ¯¿x stri.

The vowel sounds in Table III are illustrated with vowels used in English words. As the sounds o, oi, and ou are not used in English, examples are not given; o is a short, rounded o as in bow (ribbon), oi is a rounded oy as in boy, and ou is a rounded o as in boat.

In the text, there are no capitalizations in the romanization, as some capital letters indicate differences in pronunciation: e.g., t, T; d, D.

Most foreign words are spelled according to the English spelling, even though they are pronounced slightly differently in Bangla. Since many English words have been incorporated as loan words in Bangla, it is easier for the reader to recognize the English terms if the romanizations have the same spelling, (with the exception of some words; doctor/ Daktar).

Nasalization is not depicted in the romanization.  

Table 1 - Vowels and Vowel Diacritics

Table II - Consonants

u  candrabindu – nasalises the vowel it is attached to

s anusshar – adds an ng sound to a consonant or vowel, e.g., Us = Tawng

&  hasanto – mutes the inherent vowel of a consonant, e.g., U = Taw; U& = T

o, p, daw-e shunno raw, dhaw-e shunno raw - are allophonic variations of W = daw, X = dhaw

h, jaw- a semi-vowel, in an initial position, pronounced as jaw, in a medial and final position, pronounced as yaw.

Table III - Vowel Sounds 

Table 1V - Conjunct Consonants

Table V - Special Consonant + Vowel Combinations 

Bibliography

Bhattacharji, S., Chatterjee, and S., Dimock, D. (1997), Introduction to Bengali, Part I, New Delhi, India: Manohar.

The World Factbook, CIA, http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/bg.html

Counry Studies, The Library of Congress, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/bdtoc.html

The Lonely Planet Country Guides, http://www.lonelyplanet.com/destinations/indian_subcontinent/bangladesh/culture.htm

Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh#Geography