ben.atwood.com.au

I got a nice surprise for my 23rd birthday when I heard that my parentals were getting me a Bengali-English dictionary. Not that my parentals don’t get me nice things for my birthday – far from it – but more because, well, have you tried finding a Bengali-English dictionary in Australia? Yeah. Didn’t think so.

It turns out that it’s not drastically unreasonable to go straight to the source and purchase straight from Bangladesh. I think the book itself cost about Tk 300, which is less than AU$10, which is not bad when you consider that bilingual dictionaries for more mainstream languages would cost much more than that. The big setback is the postage times. You can’t really blame the Bangladesh Post Office – much of their infrastructure was destroyed in the 1970s during the Independence War, and since then, it hasn’t enjoyed monopoly over the postal system, so it’s no wonder if it’s struggling a bit.

Still, the dictionary made it here inside of two months, so that isn’t too bad.

Here’s what the package looked like when Ma and Pa Atwood gave it to me:

Does that wrapping look funny to you? If so, that would be because it’s cloth. And how might you keep a book bound up in cloth securely wrapped for international shipping? The simple answer is: stitching. Stiching sealed with wax.

I love the Bangladesh Post Office. The cloth smells just like the bazar in Savar, and while I would have liked to have stood there in the kitchen, smelling a bit of cloth which has just travelled halfway round the world, I was keen to get the parcel open. So, armed with scissors, I delicately de-sutured the package enough to peel the cloth off and get at the book inside (which was wrapped in brown paper…like the books I bought from the bazar).

I don’t know what these stamps are for (I was thinking they might have been the post stamps), but they look cool:

And here it is, direct from the Bangla Academy in Dhaka:

A Bangla-English dictionary is sorted by Bangla letters and words. The idea is that I’ll be able to read Bangla text and look up words that are unfamiliar. When I was in Bangladesh earlier this year, I scored myself an English-Bangla dictionary, which is helpful for translating English into Bangla, but this will assist in reading and understanding Bangla. So, it’s no surprise when the introduction looked a bit like this:

The first line says something like: Bangla Academy English-Bengali Dictionary prokasher por pathok shomajer bapok shara amaderke gobhirbhar anondito o utoshahito kore. I’m not really sure what that means, but I’ll probably be able to tell you in a couple of months. Watch this space.

I love books from that part of the world. They appear tacky and low-quality compared to the glossy (or, even better, matte) covers and silky paper pages of Western books, but even though their paper is thin and kind of damp, and the printing is smudged, and the covers are plain, they have a certain appeal.

A while back – say, April – I had a bit of a rant about the first-edition Lonely Planet Bengali phrasebook, and how it used shadhu basha, or high Bangla, where it really should have been using cholti basha, or common Bangla. As indignant and self-righteous as I may have seemed, it looks like I was right (!), because I managed to purchase a third-edition Lonely Planet phrasebook, which now incorporates Hindi, Urdu, and Bengali.

This new edition is a vast improvement, at least from my perspective. Even though it is shorter in length (something of a necessity, to include Hindi and Urdu), it seems to pack in a lot more in the way of phrases one might use – for example, in my travels to Bangladesh, I would not have found the phrase ekhane kothay gari bhara paoa jayo? (where can I hire a car?) useful, unless I were to be suddenly overtaken by suicidal tendencies and decided that I should end my mortal existence by taking driving in Bangladesh into my own hands (for interest’s sake, the above phrase is rendered as ami ekta gari bara korthe chai, which is, I think, could be more closely translated as ‘I would like to hire one car’). However, it would have been handy to ask ingrejite liken? (can you write it in English?), or accha mane ki? (what does ‘accha’ mean?). Though I wouldn’t be able to tell, it looks like Lonely Planet have done a much better job of translating English phrases into cholti basha, as the constructions and words look a lot more familiar to me than those found in the old phrasebook.

Another less noticeable improvement is the rendering of the script. When I went to Bangladesh in 2005, I couldn’t read Bangla script at all, but when I picked it up on my return, I began to notice that the words in the first edition phrasebook were not really translated properly. I can’t be sure if it was a mistake or a printer’s error or what, but there were some words in the Devengari script which just weren’t what was translated into English. Thankfully, the third edition appears to have rectified this.

So, before this becomes an ad for Lonely Planet, I can more highly recommend this phrasebook, not just for travelling in Bangladesh, but also for grappling with the structure of the language. There is a handy introductory section which gives you all the letters of the Bangla alphabet and provides an overview of sentence construction and grammar (not enough for you to start speaking it without the phrasebook, but maybe enough to get you going), and a reasonable dictionary at the back. Two thumbs up!

This is mostly for my own reference, but I just discovered a web site called Connect-Bangladesh. This is an American-based relief organisation which aims to provide educational support for schools in developing countries. A worthy aim, but I’m extra-interested in their Bangla page, which has various sections on cardinal numbers, body parts, days and seasons, and the alphabet.

Unlike other Bangla resources I’ve found on the web, this site includes graphics of the Bangla script, though their transliterations seem to use the somewhat-unhelpful Hindi schema.