The Lord’s Prayer in Bengali:
হে আমাদের স্বর্গস্থ পিতা,
তোমার নাম পূজিত হউক,
তোমার রাজ্য আসুক,
তোমার ইচ্ছা যেমন স্বর্গে,
তেমনি পৃথিবীতেও পূর্ণ হউক,
আমাদের দৈনিক অন্ন আজ আমাদিগকে দাও,
আর আমরা যেমন অপরাধীকে ক্ষমা করি তেমনি তুমিও আমাদের অপরাধ ক্ষমা কর,
আর আমাদিগকে প্রলোভনে পড়তে দিও না,
কিন্ত মন্দের হাত থেকে উদ্ধার করো।
[রাজ্য, পরাক্রম ও মহিমা যুগে যুগে তোমার।]
আমেন।
Bengali (950- ) is the main language of Bangladesh and the neighbouring Indian states of West Bengal and Tripura.
- Speakers: 245 million (226m or 92% native), the seventh largest language worldwide.
- Countries: Most speakers live in Bangladesh and India, many in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, UAE, US and Britain.
- Script: Bengali alphabet, written left to right, like English. Each letter stands for a syllable. No capital letters. Most punctuation comes from English.
- Language family: Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family.
Similar languages: It is almost the same language as Oriya and Assamese. It is a close cousin of Hindi and other languages of northern India. Hindi and Bengali come from Sanskrit, just as French and Spanish come from Latin, and at about the same time too, about a thousand years ago. As an Indo-European language, it is a distant cousin of English: Bengali and English used to be the same language some 7,000 years ago.
Compare:
English: mother, new, night, three. Latin: mater, novus, nox, tres. Spanish: madre, nuevo, noche, tres. Sanskrit: mater, nava, nakt, trayas. Bengali: mata, nobo, ratri, tin.
Even though most Bengali speakers today are Muslim or Hindu by religion, its earliest writers were mostly Buddhist.
At school you learn to write in Standard Colloquial Bengali, which is based on the everyday speech of educated people in Kolkata (Calcutta). There is an older, more flowery literary dialect, Shadhubhasha, where almost half the words are straight Sanskrit. It was common in the 1800s but is rarely used now, thanks in part to Tagore and other writers:
Rabindranath Tagore, a poet, is by far the best known Bengali writer in the West: he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, the first winner who was not born in Europe. He won:
“because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West.”
In other words, he won as an English writer, not a Bengali one! If he is that good in English, think what he must be like in Bengali. He had translated and reworked his book of poems “Gitanjali” (1910) into English, which became a hit in Britain. UNESCO considers it a masterpiece.
English words that come from Bengali: only one that I know of: jute, in 1746, from jhuto, which in turn comes from the Sanskrit word for twisted or matted hair, jutas. Jute is still a big export from Bangladesh. Most Indian words in English come from Hindi or Sanskrit.
Grammar: Like Yoda, Bengali puts the verb at the end of a sentence. But unlike him, it puts the subject of the verb, not the object, first. Where Yoda would say, “The lightsabre Yoda grasped,” Bengali would say, “Yoda the lightsabre grasped.”
Learning Bengali, for an English speaker, is about as hard as learning, say, Russian or Hebrew. Not as easy as French or Spanish, but not as hard as Chinese or Arabic.
– Abagond, 2017.
Sources: especially ministrants.com (Lord’s Prayer), nobelprize.org (glowing words), aboutworldlanguages.com (learning difficulty), The Atlantic (Yoda grammar), CIA Factbook (jute exports), Online Etymology Dictionary (Bengali words in English), Britannica (overview).
See also:
- Proto-Indo-European
- Bangladesh
- West Bengal
- Tripura
- Top languages
- Half the world – speaks one of eight languages, Bengali among them.
622
I see posts on my timeline in this language. Thank you for this enlightening and interesting article.
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@ Mary
It was my pleasure.
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I have decided to take the plunge and start learning Bengali. I have met a Bangladeshi recent arrival to Hong Kong and we decided to exchange Bengali and Cantonese.
My eventual goal is to have a good working knowledge of the top 10 languages of the world and the top 10 languages of the United States in addition to the ones I already use. If / when I go back to the US, I will also learn the Unami dialect of Lenape – the closest native language to where I grew up.
Means I will have to resume Hindi, Arabic and Russian and Vietnamese at some point too, and I will have to fit that in.
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Wow, how ambitious! You’ll be able to lie in ten languages.
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