Language Tasting: Bengla

Keith Huddleston
Aug 25, 2017 · 3 min read
http://www.dcaa.com.bd/Modules/CountryProfile/BangladeshFlag.aspx, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=342968

I spent a week playing around with Bengla. Am I fluent in it now? Nope. But I did have a great time with one of the top-10 spoken languages on earth.

On my tour of Bengla I started with Omniglot, where I hunted around for the common politeness phrases, though I prefer them with sound. There also is a Memrise course with someone pronouncing the phrases, if you have an account. It is no-typing course, which is the way these things should be, especially in languages that require a different keyboard. And Bengla certainly seems to be that.

I had played around with Hindi before, and I really loved the Devanagari script. I found it really beautiful and fun to write in. So I compared it to the Bengali script, writing them out side by side by sound. I don’t expect everyone to find that fun, but it is my language tasting experience on my language vacation. It was a fun activity for me, really relaxing and meditative — something to do with my hands.

Culture

Next, I did some research about the language, and I read about Rabindranath Tagore (in Spanish), the first non-European to win the Noble Prize for literature, also I read the page about him in Esperanto, which lead to an Esperanto translation of a poem of his, and an interesting article that gave me some insight into language and higher education in India. I never would have seen this article without first looking in Bengali. Surprises like this are exactly why I like these mini-vacations into another language.

I also had never known how the Bangladesh Liberation War went down, or even that it had come to a war, and it was one the more interesting Wikipedia articles I had read in a while. So, in the 50s when the U.S. was trying to get women back in the kitchen after being Rosy the Riveter, Bengalis people were dying to preserve their language as their overlords, on the other side of India were trying to enforce Urdu on them. In 1971, while we were having ramped-up drug use and Vietnam War protests, Pakistan tried to wipe out the Bengla-speaking leadership, leading to a war that resulted in 3 million deaths and independence for Bangladesh.

Music

Possibly the best part of investigating a culture is listening to music. Bengla music seems easy enough to find. Here’s the first one I found, and it was in a YouTube mix:

Minar Rahman, simply known as Minar, is a Bangladeshi lyricist, composer, singer, actor and cartoonist.. . . Cool!

This song shows off the softness and beauty of the language. This is also 45 minutes of awesome, showing off a different side to Bengla sung. I’ve also been soaking in some streaming radio to hear the language in the spoken. Since I don’t understand the words, I can play it while doing exercises, and even some work with it in the background.

Why Should I Learn? . . .

Another fun search involving a language is off the term “why should I learn X.” You’ll often be able to see a description of a language’s features, if any of them make life easier for you coming at it from English.

And sometimes you get beautiful descriptions about living the good life:

In some ways, I suppose you could say I fell in love. With the humidity, the tree in my courtyard, the house behind mine. With turning the pages of Tagore and reading the words of Gitanjali for the first time. With Music World, where I deciphered characters round, angular, and elegant and vowed to learn this alphabet. And so I bought a book.

Again, no quest, no discoveries like this. Any feed is just going to feed me by and large more of what I have had in the past.

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Keith Huddleston

Written by

Truth, beauty, agape, and the dao. Seeking to do more with less requires understanding.

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