বাংলা বিষয়ক বিভিন্ন অনলাইন সার্ভিস Bangla related online services

The Bengali alphabet is believed to have evolved from a modified Brahmic script around 1000 CE (or 10th–11th century). Two of these, /oi̯/ and /ou̯/, are the only ones with representation in script, as ঐ and ঔ respectively. Bengali is known for its wide variety of diphthongs, combinations of vowels occurring within the same syllable.

• The majority of Bengalis are able to communicate in more than one variety – often, speakers are fluent in Cholitobhasha (SCB) and one or more regional dialects.
• Focus on understanding spoken Bengali in different contexts – formal speech, casual conversation, and regional accents.
• 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.
• In 2010, the parliament of Bangladesh and the legislative assembly of West Bengal proposed that Bengali be made an official UN language.

Unlike in Western scripts (Latin, Cyrillic, etc.) where the letter forms stand on an invisible baseline, the Bengali letter-forms instead hang from a visible horizontal left-to-right headstroke called মাত্রা matra. Like other Indic scripts, the Bengali script has Schwa deletion and does not always mark when the inherent vowel is deleted — typically at the end of words. A vowel at the beginning of a word is always realised using its independent form.

The script used for Bengali, Assamese, and other languages is known as Bengali script. Almost all the cases of silent letters existing in Bengali are found in the tatsam words.The Bengali writing system, therefore, is often not a true guide for pronunciation. That is why most of the tatsam words are pronounced way different from what they are written or spelt. Bengali has lots of tatsam words (words directly derived from Sanskrit) and in all these words, the original spelling has been preserved but the pronunciations have changed due to consonant mergers and sound shifts.

Future Tense (ভবিষ্যৎ কাল – Bhobishyot Kaal)

In general, the script is fairly transparent for “tadbhav” words (native Bengali words). The banglabet-bd.com/app/ Bengali script in general has a comparatively shallow orthography when compared to the Latin script used for English and French, i.e., in many cases there is a one-to-one correspondence between the sounds (phonemes) and the letters (graphemes) of Bengali. Up until the 19th century, numerous variations of the Arabic script had been used across Bengal from Chittagong in the east to Meherpur in the west. There is yet to be a uniform standard collating sequence (sorting order of graphemes to be used in dictionaries, indices, computer sorting programs, etc.) of Bengali graphemes. The letter-forms also employ the concepts of letter-width and letter-height (the vertical space between the visible matra and an invisible baseline).

After close contact with several indigenous Austroasiatic languages, and later the Delhi Sultanate, the Bengal Sultanate, and the Mughal Empire, whose court language was Persian, numerous Arabic, Persian, and Chaghatai words were absorbed into the lexicon. Because of centuries of contact with Europeans, Turkic peoples, and Persians, Bengali has absorbed numerous words from foreign languages, often totally integrating these borrowings into the core vocabulary. About 45% per cent of Bengali words are unmodified Sanskrit, and the remaining words are from foreign languages. In this sense, all nouns in Bengali, unlike most other Indo-European languages, are similar to mass nouns.

Complete Bengali Grammar Guide – Master Bengali Language Structure

To represent a vowel in isolation from any preceding or following consonant, the independent form of the vowel is used. A consonant sound followed by some vowel sound other than the inherent ɔ is orthographically realised by using a variety of vowel allographs above, below, before, after, or around the consonant sign, thus forming the ubiquitous consonant-vowel typographic ligatures. Since the Bengali script is an abugida, its consonant graphemes usually do not represent phonetic segments, but carry an “inherent” vowel and thus are syllabic in nature. Native Bengali words do not allow initial consonant clusters; the maximum syllabic structure is CVC (i.e., one vowel flanked by a consonant on each side).

Bengali Months (মাস – Maash) – 12 Months Vocabulary

This diacritic, however, is not common and is chiefly employed as a guide to pronunciation. The inherent vowel is usually a back vowel, either ɔ as in মত mɔt “opinion” or o, as in মন mon “mind”, with variants like the more open ɒ. Bengali script has a distinctive horizontal line running along the tops of the graphemes that links them together called মাত্রা matra.

To emphatically represent a consonant sound without any inherent vowel attached to it, a special diacritic, called the hôsôntô (্), may be added below the basic consonant grapheme (as in ম্ m). The letters run from left to right and spaces are used to separate orthographic words. While most writing is in Standard Colloquial Bengali (SCB), spoken dialects exhibit a greater variety. For example, the word salt is লবণ lôbôṇ in the east which corresponds to নুন nun in the west. What is accepted as the standard form today in both West Bengal and Bangladesh is based on the West-Central dialect of Nadia and Kushtia District. Similarly, Hajong is considered a separate language, although it shares similarities to Northern Bengali dialects.

The potential influence of Tibeto-Burman languages on the phonology of Eastern Bengali is used to explain the lack of nasalised vowels and an alveolar articulation of what are categorised as the “cerebral” consonants (as opposed to the postalveolar articulation of western Bengal). The Bengali-Assamese script is an abugida, a script with letters for consonants, with diacritics for vowels, and in which an inherent vowel (অ ô) is assumed for consonants if no vowel is marked. These 39 consonants combine with vowels to create all Bengali words. According to Suniti Kumar Chatterji, dictionaries from the early 20th century attributed a little more than 50% of the Bengali vocabulary to native words (i.e., naturally modified Sanskrit words, corrupted forms of Sanskrit words, and loanwords non-Indo-European languages). Other related languages in the nearby region also make use of the Bengali script like the Meitei language in the Indian state of Manipur, where the Meitei language has been written in the Bengali script for centuries, though the Meitei script has been promoted in recent times. For example, the combination of the consonants ক্ k and ষ ʂ is graphically realised as ক্ষ and is pronounced kkʰo (as in রুক্ষ rukkʰo “coarse”), kʰɔ (as in ক্ষমতা kʰɔmota “capability”) or even kʰo (as in ক্ষতি kʰoti “harm”), depending on the position of the cluster in a word.

Persian influence was significant for the development of Bengali up to the modern day, and was the primary official language in the region for 600 years, until British rule, when it was changed to English in 1836. More recent studies suggest that the use of foreign words has been increasing, mainly because of the preference of Bengali speakers for the colloquial style. Persian is also thought to have influenced many grammatical forms. 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 honour (intimate, familiar, and formal), but not for number. However, when the semantic class of the noun is understood from the measure word, the noun is often omitted and only the measure word is used, e.g. শুধু একজন থাকবে। Shudhu êk-jôn thakbe. In most of Bengali grammar books, cases are divided into 6 categories and an additional possessive case (the possessive form is not recognised as a type of case by Bengali grammarians).