Colloquial Bengali The Complete Course for Beginners Mithun B. Nasrin and W.A.M. van der Wurft Routledge Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2009 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2009 Mithun B. Nasrin and W.A.M. van der WurlT Typeset in Times by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nasrin, Mithun B. Colloquial Bengali / Mithun B. Nasrin and W.A.M. van der WurfT. p. cm. - (The colloquial series) Includes index. 1. Bengali language - Spoken Bengali. 2. Bengali language - Textbooks for foreign speakers — English. I. Nasrin, Mithun B. II. Title. PK1663.N38 2008 491.4'4-dc22 2008014997 ISBN13: 978-0-415-26119-7 (pbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-30254-8 (audio CDs) ISBN13: 978-0-415-26121-0 (pack) ISBN13: 978-0-415-47676-8 (MP3) Contents Introduction The sounds of Bengali The Bengali script 18 - e 7w e 27 apnar nam ki? What's your name? @31 & SR TSl ©iR? 39 era ki apnar mamato bhai? Are these your cousins? @AIg IIG! QT TTR? 50 onar kOeTa baRi ache? How many houses does he have? D1 @ facee kalimondirTa kon dike? In what direction is the temple of Kali? ey & & e 73 apni ki ki dekhechen? What have you seen? wiefy f& Aame 87 apni ki khaben? What would you like to eat? e & ag sacA? 97 apni ki ranna korchen? What are you cooking? vi Contents AIal? 108 dakhabo? Shall | show it to you? a2 &% & 9w I TR [ ARy 120 ei cekTa ki ekhane kaesh kore nite pari? Can | cash this cheque here? 10 QT (P8 AT 72 131 ekhane keu thake na? Doesn’t anyone live here? 11 SR & =2 144 tarpOre ki holo? What happened next? 12 e Fe & & orgrens 156 apnara skule ki ki poRten? What did you study at school? 13 i T @OTR & & JIRT ICE? 168 jomi hal dewar jonno ki baebohar kOren? What do you use for ploughing the land? 14 P16 IO YO FOI AT Face 7@ 180 flaiT dOshTae chaRle kOTae riporT korte hObe? If the flight leaves at ten, at what time should | check in? 15 TAE 97 B/ [ w@w 191 nObobOrshe ar k| kl kOra hOe? What else is done on New Year’s Day? Transliterations of Bengali-script texts 203 Bengali script - summary 212 Numbers 216 Bengali grammar - summary 221 Translation of reading texts 231 Key to exercises 234 Bengali-English glossary 257 Index 279 Introduction The Bengali language fl (cD1; 1-6) This book provides you with an introduction to Bengali, the lan- guage of Bangladesh and the state of West Bengal in India. It may be the case that you want to learn this language for purely practical reasons, because you need to communicate with native speakers of Bengali, in Bengal or elsewhere. Or perhaps you have become inter- ested in Bengali language, culture and literature through seeing films by Satyajit Ray (pronounced shOttojit rae in Bengali), the director who was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 1992, or through hearing about the poems and stories of Tagore, winner of the 1913 Nobel Prize for literature (Tagore’s Bengali name is actually Rabindranath Thakur, pronounced robindronath Thakur). Whatever your motivation for learning Bengali, we obviously need to begin with the basics. Let’s therefore start with a simple sentence (the earphones symbol Q indicates that this material appears on the CD accompanying this book; listen to it to hear how this sen- tence is pronounced): ami bangla jani na a Bengali know not-i.e. I don’t know Bengali) As you can see, where English puts the verb or verbs (‘don’t know’) immediately after the subject (‘I’), Bengali usually puts the verb towards or at the end of the sentence. Also note that the word na ‘not’ immediately follows the word to which it refers, i.e. jani. This is different from English, but once you know it, there is noth- ing difficult about it. In fact, if we tell you that the Bengali word for ‘am learning’ is shikhchi, you may also be able to say the following useful sentence in Bengali: I’'m learning Bengali. Introduction Listen to the CD to check whether you have got it right. You may also have guessed the sentence that you will be able to utter truthfully once you have worked your way through this book: ami bangla jani (I Bengali know -ie. I know Bengali) From these examples, you will have gathered that, in Bengali itself (and nowadays also sometimes in English), the language is called bangla. The word of course also crops up in the name for the region where it is spoken, i.e. Bengal, and in the name Bangladesh, which very appropriately means ‘Bangla Country’ (hence its variant spelling, Bangla Desh). This brings us to the matter of words or vocabulary. It cannot be denied that mastering Bengali vocabulary, like learning the vocabu- lary of any language, will take a real effort on your part. However, there are two facts about Bengali that will go some way toward easing the task of vocabulary acquisition. Two helpful facts about Bengali The first helpful fact is that English and Bengali belong to the same linguistic group, called the Indo-European family of languages. This I ntroduction means that both English and Bengali (and many other languages spoken in Europe and the southern and western parts of Asia) are descendants of one and the same language, which was spoken some six thousand years ago. In the course of time, the dialects of this language have grown apart to such an extent that they are now completely different languages. Nevertheless, the distant kinship means that, here and there, recognisable similarities still exist between English and Bengali. Thus, the Bengali word jani in the sentences given above is related to the English word ‘know’: in spelling, you can see the consonants j-n corresponding to ‘k-n’ (in English, of course, the ‘k’ in ‘know’ is not pronounced any more, making the relatedness of the two words somewhat hard to detect). And as you probably realised, the Bengali word na is the same as English ‘no(t)’. Other examples are nam (‘name’), aT (‘eight’), ddt (‘tooth’), dOrja (‘door’) and gOrom (‘warm’). It is true that the number of similar-sounding words like this is not large, yet they are very useful in the early stages of learning the language: they will help you realise that you are not groping your way around in completely unknown territory - there are some objects that you can already recognise. So can you guess which of the (ollowing Bengali words corres- ponds to which English one? pOth naked JOmba up(per) dui bind tritio nose nzngta mouth badha third nak long upore path mukh two A second fact about Bengali is even more helpful: dozens if not hundreds of Bengali words will look very familiar to you because they are loanwords adopted from English into Bengali. This happened during the long period of close contact between the two languages when nearly the whole of the South Asian subcontinent was under British rule. As a result, it is not too difficult to guess the meanings of the following words, all of which are part and parcel of everyday Bengali: ce-ar, Tebil, kap, peleT, gelash, ofish/opis/apis introduction Again, you should listen to the CD to hear how these English words sound when pronounced in Bengali. As the last example shows, there are sometimes various pronunciations in use for such loanwords. The borrowing of words from English into Bengali is still taking place today. English is spoken as a second or third language by many Bengalis and some of them like to pepper their Bengali with English words, phrases or even complete sentences. Although perhaps we shouldn’t be saying this, if at any point you’re searching for a Bengali word but don’t know or remember it, you could try simply using the English word. As long as you embed it properly into the Bengali grammatical structure, chances are you will be understood. You might, for example, try the following sentence whenever you get tired of saying ‘I don’t know Bengali’: ami inglish jani Of course, it is better still to use the Bengali word, ingreji (actually, this is just a more thoroughly Bengalified version of the same word) and say: ami ingreji jani Varieties of Bengali Before we describe the set-up and aims of this book and plunge right into the Bengali language, there are a couple of other things that you should know about the different types of Bengali that you may encounter. First, like all other languages, Bengali has various re- gional dialects, which diverge to a greater or lesser degree from each other and from what is considered by speakers of Bengali them- selves to be ‘proper’ Bengali. As a learner of the language, you are probably best off steering clear of regional dialects and aiming for ‘proper’ Bengali, i.e. the Bengali that is spoken by educated speakers and that does not evoke negative reactions from other speakers. This is the Bengali that you will find in this book. However, ‘proper’ Bengali itself comes in two types, since there is a standard Bengali in the West (i.e. in the Indian state of West Bengal, where the majority of the ¢. 70 million speakers of the lan- guage are Hindu) and a different standard Bengali in the East (i.e. in Bangladesh, where most of the ¢. 130 million speakers are Muslim). Each of these two standards evokes mildly negative reactions from the other group, with the Western standard sounding over-refined to Introduction 7 BANGLADESH WEST BENGAL D " Ny Bengal-Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal some Eastern ears, and the Eastern standard sounding rural or back- ward to some Western ears (we hope we are offending nobody by these characterisations — as you will discover, all types of Bengali actually sound extremely pleasing and mellifluous). The differences between the two varieties are not enormous, but they can be found in all areas of the language: pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar (in particular, word endings). We will in all cases note such differences, using the labels ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ (or simply ‘E’ and ‘W’). Note that the W-forms are also often used by Hindus living in Bangladesh. Another division is that between written and spoken Bengali. You will have noted that the Bengali words and sentences given so far introduction have all been in the Roman alphabet. But we can assure you: Bengali has a script all its own, developed from the same source as the devanagari writing system of Sanskrit, the ancient language of North- ern India. As you will find out further on in this book, the Bengali script requires some effort to master but (like Bengali pronunciation and grammar) it is not shockingly difficult, and it does a good job at representing clearly and unambiguously most of the sounds of the language. To give you a little taste of what is ahead, we give here the sentence ‘I am learning Bengali’ in Bengali script. (The script reads from left to right.) Do you remember how it is pronounced? wfy Qe fEifg Finally, when you know enough Bengali to tackle literary texts written roughly before the middle of the last century, you will en- counter there a type of Bengali that shows many old-fashioned word forms and heavy use of Sanskrit words. This elevated and slightly artificial variety of the language is called shadhu bhasha, i.e. ‘pure language’. It is important because it is used in some of the writings by Rabindranath Thakur and other great authors of 19th- and early 20th-century Bengali literature. In the same period, texts were also written in a less stylised variety of Bengali; this is often called colti (or colito) bhasha, i.e. ‘current language’, since it was closer to the ordinary spoken language. Present-day writing in Bengali is mostly in either the Western or Eastern standard, depending on where the author comes from. It is not unusual, however, to find Bangladeshi texts that include some Western forms. Learning colloquial Bengali with this book So you want to learn Bengali. You have just discovered that you can already recognise some Bengali words. You have also learned to say ami bangla jani na and ami bangla jani. How will this book help you to move from the first sentence to the second one? It will do so by offering you a large amount of colloquial Bengali as it would be used by ordinary speakers and writers of various types and in various situations. The material has been carefully graded, so that what is simplest and most useful for a learner comes first, and what is more difficult or specialised comes later. In the first four units, all the material is immediately followed by an English transla- tion and in the later units, lists of vocabulary are given, so that the meaning of any dialogue or text will always be clear. The CD, which