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Previously, I covered the ten basic Bangla vowel sounds and their characters, and made an attempt at describing how those vowels are integrated into words (via the -kar signatures). To revise, I’m including some Bangla text found on a paper bag from Savar bazaar.

Transliterated, this reads: “Bhenas curi | sho-rum : e blok 275-276, rajdhani shupar market”. Translated, it says “Venus Bangles | Showroom: E-block 275-276, Rajdhani supermarket”.

This text gives a good example of some of the various vowel -kars at work. In the first word, the ekar is bracketed around the /bh/ sound; in the second word, the ukar is appended to the bottom of the unvoiced /ch/ sound.

The use of the /e/ by itself in the second line (after the colon) raises the dual-sound nature of this letter. Like many English letters, the Bangla /e/ has two sounds – it can be pronounced as an ‘e’ (e.g. cafe), or it can be pronounced as ‘ae’ (e.g. bat). How do you know which is which? Generally, it seems that when reading script by itself, you have no way of knowing unless you have foreknowledge of the word. This surprised me and left me feeling a bit insecure about how to read Bangla words properly, until I realised that English is the same, only worse: there are six separate sounds that the English /a/ can make, and there aren’t six different characters for ‘a’, so it’s something you can only learn by memorising how the word is meant to be pronounced. I’m beginning to feel for people who learn English as a second language.

But back to /e/. Apparently, more common words like kaeno (why) and kaemon (how), and verbs where the /e/ changes between ‘e’ and ‘ae’ depending on tense, utilise the ‘ae’ pronunciation more often. Additionally, there appears to be some variation in speakers in Bangladesh and in West Bengal, and within each of those regions. I suppose knowledge of these subtleties only comes from speaking the language on a daily basis.