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XVI Mr. Rabindranath Tagore's Notes on Bengali Grammar
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2011
Extract
Since everyone interested in Indian studies has probably read Mr. Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali, and has learned from Mr. Yeats's Introduction to that work that its author is an expert in many other matters than poetry, it may be interesting to readers of our Journal to know that Mr. Tagore has written a very suggestive and original study under the title of Śabdatattwa of the grammar and phonetics of his native language. It would take too much space to give an account of the whole book, which, after all, contains many technicalities which are only useful to professed students of Bengali. But I may be allowed to give a brief description of the chapter which criticizes Mr. Beames, well-known Bengali Grammar. This chapter relates almost entirely to questions of pronunciation, and these are notoriously difficult to discuss in writing. The differences between Mr. Beanies and his critic are sometimes, I think, partly due to this difficulty.
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page 534 note 1 [There is no way of writing the true short o, the o heard in “imposition”, in Bengali. I think Mr. Tagore means that the o in “van”, “man”, etc., is short but has not the sound of ŏ in “hot”. He can hardly mean that the vowel in these words has the sound of ō in such words as ōṣadhī, or ghōr, or Gōpāl. On the other hand, garu, “cattle,” is pronounced with an o which (perhaps owing to the fall of the accent) it is difficult to distinguish from the ō of, say, bhōg. Pari, garu, are good examples of Mr. Tagore's rule. I confess I am a little puzzled by his reference to kṣ, of which he gives no example. In vakṣa, lakṣa, yakṣa, pakṣa, dakṣa, etc., the first a seems to be pronounced as oi rather than o. There is a reason for this, as Mr. Tagore himself has noted later on; kṣa in Bengali has the sound of khya, and the y by epenthesis affects a in a previous syllable.]
page 534 note 2 At all events, in what follows I write ŏ to represent the vowel in “hot”, o for the o in “imposition”, and ō for the o in “rove”.
page 535 note 1 The final vowel in these words is certainly long, as bhālō.
page 540 note 1 Sir George Grierson reminds me of a case (it may be found in the specimens of Bengali appended to Mr. Beanies' Grammar) in which the clash of -o ill one word with y- in another actually produces -w-. Thus in the word bārwārī, “a pūja or other entertainment paid for by public subscription.” The etymology usually given is that bārwārī = bāro, “twelve” + yāri, “friends.” In Bengali the word is written bāroyārī, but is pronounced bārwārī. A Frenchman would have the same difficulty as a Bengali in writing this word. He would have to fall back on barouari. Haughton seems to think this word to be bārobārī = bāro, “twelve” + bār, “times.”