Today our topic of discussion is – Bengali vocabulary
Bengali vocabulary
Tagore compared “language” to a “building” where ‘word’ is a “brick’ (1969: 16). Word is not only the main element of a language rather it can be said the foundation. Linguists always emphasized on word while describing language.
Vocabulary of any language gets enriched day by day. This is no more exceptional in the case of Bengali language. The vocabulary of Bengali language has been enriched for thousand years and the words got new shape and form because of the evolution of human civilization throughout the history.
The evolution not only occurred in its phonological stage but also in its semantic area. More the number of words of a language, more it is powerful and improved. Bengali, as a language, not only equal to any other advanced languages on the face of earth, but sometimes also superior in many cases.
Among the modern Indian Aryan languages, Bengali is more advanced. So the vocabulary of this language is more enriched. The number of word of any language gets enriched in two ways. One way is grabbing words of foreign language.
Another way is making new words by mating more than one native word together. Enrichment of the vocabulary of Bengali happened in those two ways. But the first way makes a less and the second way makes a lot” (Sen, 1994: 44).
Therefore, making the origins of borrowed words in the Bengali vocabulary numerous and diverse, due to centuries of contact with various languages.
Linguists classified Bengali words from different point of view. They classified words according to the structure, sometimes according to the meaning.
Words can be classified according to the origins and historical development. Again, they can be classified as the parts of speech (Sikder, 2002). Here is the classification of Bengali words according to their origins, since this is the study of loan words where the origin and background of those words will be focused. The classification is as follows:
Native words
“The root of words or the etymology is still unknown is called native words. Linguists recently included Austrick and Dravidian words in it. In other word, words which were current before the entrance of Aryans in this locality are called native words’ (Sikder, 2002: 191).
Name of animals and birds, beasts, fish, household materials and utensils, fruits and foods etc belong to this class of words.
Simple or root words
Words which cannot be broken and which have their meaning are called simple or root words. If we try to break them, we will end up with a meaningless environment. We also know them as free morphemes. Simple words are of three types. These are –
a) Unchanged Sanskrit words
b) Slightly changed or distorted Sanskrit words
c) Derived words from Sanskrit
New words
There are a lot of words in Bengali which are created by combining more than one words from one language or two different languages. There are two types in this category.
These are –
a) Compounded
b) Translated
Linguists noticed this process of word formation not only limited in one language rather more than one in the era of globalization. That is why new words are being created by combining words from different languages. Not only words, in this case affixes are also responsible to create new word.
Loan or borrowed words
Words which are adopted from foreign origin are called loan words. As we know, once Aryans came in this land and after them Turkish and Mughals ruled the Bengal for 500 years. Then Portuguese and French came and after them British and other foreigners.
came for business. For years of colonization, words from those foreign origins entered in Bengali language. We not only got Arabic and Persian words in our language, but also English words because of the 200 years of British colonization.
We have a lot of borrowed words in our vocabulary adopted from Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Portuguese, Urdu, Hindi, French, Dutch and English language.
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