Bengali

From Wikipedia

Bengali or Bangla is one of the Indo-European Languages which originated in most part from the ancient language of Sanskrit. It is spoken and used in Bangladesh, Indian states of West Bengal, part of Assam , Tripura, Arunachal Pradesh. It has close general kinship and resemblence to other indic languages particularly with Assamese and Oriya languages. This language is spoken and used by more than 210 million people. It has rich literature and great heritage.

The earliest written example of this language, esimated to be from AD 1000 to 1050, came from the Royal Archives of Nepal, collected by (Mahamohopadhyay ) Harprasad Shastri , an eminent bengali scholar, researcher and writer , who was closely associated with Kolkata(Calcutta) University in late nineteenth century. These primitive bengali sample is known as Chaja-Pada(CharyaPada - the song and hymn of the roaming monk) or Charja-geeti. They are poetic or lyrical renderings of mystic-philosophic type.

The written form of bengali language has 50 letters of which 12 are vowels. The written script originated from an older version of DevNagari called Nagari. This DevNagari script is the script used for Sanskrit and Hindi languages and in very similar format in many of the indic languages.

The spoken format of Bengali is almost fully phonetic. Just as the opposite of English, stress is given at the begining of an word in Bengali.There are several dialect variants of the spoken form of the language distributed regionally. Although the written form is standard and common.

Present day Bengali is an exquisitly vibrant,profound,evolving language and literature producing a vast universe of its own culture.