REPOR T R E S UMES ED 012 047 AL 000 538 INTRODUCTION TO THE' DACCA DIALECT OF BENGALI. BY- RAY, PUNYA SLOKA AND OTHERS CHICAGO UNIV., ILL. REPORT NUMBER BR-5-.1283 PUS DATE 66 CONTRACT OE -5 -14 -041 EDRS PRICEMF-$0.45 HC-$12.80 320P. DESCRIPTORS- *BENGALI, *LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION, *CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS, ENGLISH, PHONOLOGY, TAPE RECORDINGS, DIALECTS, DACCA DIALECT, CHICAGO THIS INTRODUCTORY STUDENT'S TEXT IS BASED ON A MODIFIED FORM OF BENGALI, AS SPOKEN IN AND AROUND DACCA, THE CAPITAL CITY OF EAST PAKISTAN. THE TEXT CONSISTS OF A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH AND DACCA BENGALI PHONOLOGY, AND 15 LESSON UNITS, ACCOMPANIED BY TAPES CORRELATED WITH THE CONVERSATION BUILDVPS AND DRILLS. THE MATERIAL IS DESIGNED TO DEVELOP ORAL SKILLS BEFORE INTRODUCING THE WRITTEN LANGUAGE. THE GENERAL FORMAT AND METHODOLOGY OF THIS BOOK FOLLOW "AN INTRODUCTION TO BENGALI, PART I," BY EDWARD C. DIMOCK AND OTHERS, EAST WEST CENTER PRESS, 1965. THIS EARLIER TEXT BY DIMOCK, HOWEVER, WAS BASED ON THE "STANDARD COLLOQUIAL" BENGALI WHICH IS SPOKEN THROUGHOUT WEST BENGAL AND EAST PAKISTAN AND WHICH DIFFERS FAIRLY RADICALLY IN PHONOLOGY, MORPHOLOGY, AND LEXICON FROM THE BENGALI OF DACCA. (AMM) INTRODUCTION TO THE DACCA DIALECT OF BENGALI Punya Sloka Ray Roushan Jahan Muzaffer Ahmad U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, EDUCATION & WELFARE OFFICE OF EDUCATION THIS DOCUMENT HAS BEEN REPRODUCED EXACTLY AS RECEIVEDFROM THE PERSON OR ORGANIZATION ORIGINATING IT.POINTS OF VIEW OR OPINIONS STATED DO NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENT OFFICIAL OFFICE OFEDUCATION POSITION OR POLICY. ao. IL 4 0 538 731"7.1 " INTRODUCTION TO THE DACCA DIALECT OF BENGALI Punya Sloka Ray Roushan Vahan MuzafferAhmad THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 3.966 THE RESEARCH REPORTED HEREIN WAS PERFORMED PURSUANT TO A CONTRACT WITH THE UNITED STATES OFFICE OF EDUCATION, DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, EDUCATION, AND WELFARE. ...................................................................................... 31$P .',,W4-ASVAri:Zdf54 PREFACE An Introduction to theDacca Dialect of Bengaliis based on e eac ingex An n rodu.c ion to beneli, Peat I (Honolulu: East-Wesenti57,by Edward C. Dimock,Jr., Somdev Bhattacharji,and Suhas Chatterjee, insofaras structure of the lesson materials and general methodologyare concerned. That text how- ever assumes as its targetwhat is ordinarily called Standard ColloquialBengali, the language ofreasonably well educated peoplespoken allacross Bengal, but based upon the dialectspoken in and around Calcutta. Over the past severalyears, it has become in- creasingly clear thatstudents who have learned the SCB and gone for studyor other purposes to East Pakistan havea sometimes serious linguisticadjust. ment to make. The fact has beenrecognized by the Peace Corps, for example,under whose auspices Mr. Rafique ..ulislam, alsousing as a model the SCB text, prepared special materialsfor East Pakistan at the University of Minnesota. Some of his ideas have been incorporated into thepresent text, andwe wish to acknowledge our gratitudehere. We wish also to thankMr. Shamsul Bari of Dacca and the University ofChicago, for his assistance with the preparation of thefinal copy, and Professor Edward Dimock of the Universityof Chicago, for supervision and editing of the finaldraft. INTRODUCTION 1. The language. The Bengali language is spoken by upwards of seventy- millions of people in the eastern part of the Indian sub- continent; it is a recognized language in both the Republic of Pakistan and the Republic of India. Bengali is an Indo-European language, andtherefore of the same linguistic lineageas English and the other Euro- pean languages, though of a different branch of the family. The branch of the family to which Bengalibelongs is called Indo-Iranian; its sub-branch is called Indic. In the Indic family, among the modern languages (of whichthe direct an- cestor is a form of Sanskrit)are Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Sindhi, Assamese, Oriya, Panjabi, Nepali, Sinha- lese, and Kashmiri. These languages are closely related to one another as are, for example, Italian and Spanish of the European Romance branch of the Indo-European family. Other languages of India, such as Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada, are of an entirely different language family (Dra- vidian). The immediate origins of the Bengali languageare some- what obscure,'The chances are that it derives directly from an Eastern variety Of an Indic language closely related to Sanskrit, perhaps a "dialectical" variety of that language. In any case, in the stages of Indic language development known as Prakrit and Apabhramsa, it seems clear that in the eastern areas of the Indian sub-continent-- those areas now occupied by the Indian states of Bengal, Assam,Orissa, the eastern part of Bihar, and the Pakistaniprovince of East Bengal-- divergent forms of languagewere developing. 1. For an extensive study of its history,see S.K. Chatterji, Origin and Development of the BengaliLanguage, Calcutta Uni- versity, 2 vol., 1925v27. Zrattrl..7,1111r.r.f.rr.rf.X.C.11.1233,5,tiSr-2V. Theearlies11earliestt work in Bengali which has been so far discovered is that of the so-called ciurya-padas, late Buddhist religious verses.2Some scholars date these songs as early as the 8th century, although the 10th century would probably bemore ac- curate. Interestingly, these songs have been claimed by the Assamese to be in Old Assamese, by the speakers of Oriya tobe Old Oriya,by the speakers of Hindi to be Maithili, and by the Bengalis to he Old Bengali. Bengali has a very long and a very rich literary tradi- tion. The high points of Bengali literature have beenper- haps in the periods of the 14th through the 17th centuries, when the great Vainava religious literature in the form of lyrics, biographies, and theological treatises was written, and in the 19th and 20th centuries, when Bengali literature underwent a renaissance under the impact of Western literary forms. This was the period in connection with which such names as Rabindranath Tagore and Bankim-candra Chatterji are heard. That Bengali literature has had t'Bse two peaks does not mean that between them things were stagnant. On the con- trary, in other periods much literature of interest and often of outstanding quality was being produced: for example, the Capg-mangalof Mukundarim and the Vidy&-sundarof Bhgrat- candra. The Muslim rulers of Bengal, who held sway from the beginning of the 13th century until their defeat by the Bri- tish in 1757, were ardent patrons of Bengali literature. Under their patronage both Hindu and Muslim writers flour- ished. 3 2. The arya-padaswere discovered in a MS in Nepal by M.M. Haraprasad Shastlri. They have been published several times in Bengali, and some of them translated into English (Sukumar Sen, Old Bengali Texts--in Indian Linguistics, Calcutta, 1948) and into French (M. Shahidullah, Leschants Adrien- Maisoneuve, Paris, 1928). 3. See Sukumar Sen, History of Ben aliLiterature ;Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 15607157p.Sen,History of Bengali Lan- guage and Literature,Calcutta UnivaiaTY7735477767Wash, Bengali LitierAture, Oxford University, 1949. am.s.ww. .7,T3ZPrT.,r7NT:- . a, R t w:1; ,45f4 iii fi 2. Type of The language which you are about tobegin learning is a modified form of the type of Bengali spokenin and around Dacca, the capital city of EastPakistan. There isas yet no standard language spoken all overEast Pakistan, in the way in which"standard colloquial Bengali" is spoken and un- derstood by educated speakers throughout WestBengal and to some extent throughout the wholeBengali-speaking area. You will find that in phonology, morphology, andlexicon primarily, this modified Dacca speech differs in some cases fairly radically from the type of Bengali presentedin An Introduction to BenaaliPart I. It is because of these dif- ferences, which must be recognized by the increasingnumbers of students and others concerning themselvesparticularly with East Pakistan, that these special lessonshave been designed. The term "modified form" was used above. This does not mean that the language which youwill learn in these lessons is an artificial language. It does mean that"pure" Dacca dialect, which is as divergent a dialect asthat of Birbhum or that of Sylhet from thestandard language, will not be as useful to the majority of foreigners in EastPakistan as a modified form of it. For pure dialect forms will be useful only in the geographically -- and, it is possibleto add, social -- areas in which the dialect is spoken;speech which incorporates more standard forms with dialect featureswhich are standard or becoming so, willbe understood and used by educated Pakistanis throughout East Pakistan. The fact that the dialect here described is modified is indicated by the fact that, as will be seen inthe prac- tice sentences, there is a certain amount ofstylistic choice possible. For instance, the standard Bengali post-position /goDgeol will sound well to the Dacca dialect speaker in some environments, while the more purely dialectal form/loge/ wil: "seem to be more appropriate" in others. The occurences of these variations are entirely unpredictable, andusually, in the practice sentences, both will be given. err , iv 3. The materials. a. Aims. This work is An Introduction to the Dacca Dialect. Al- though we will not neglect the written language-- indeed, part of our purpose is to teachyou to read the language well -- it has seemed to us sound practice both practically and pedagogically to introduce you to the spokenlanguage first. Before we begin to teach you the writtenlanguage, we want you to be able to carry on simple but reasonably fluentcon- versation in Bengali. The reasons for our putting the spoken language first are three. First, it is assumed thatyou will be using the spoken language in the future, thatyou will at some time be in East Pakistan. Secondly, the Bengali writing system is quite as deviant from the pronunciation of the language as is the English one; to learn to spell Bengali words in Bengali script is not the most elementary, and there- fore not the first, task.