Bangla Grammar

Bangla is a Subject-Obj-Verb (SOV) language. Bangla verb template consists of verb root, aspect marker, tense marker, and tense-wide person maker, in that order. For instance, kha-cch-il-am corresponds to the root of the verb “eat”-continuous aspect marker “cch”- past tense marker “il”- 1st person marker for the past tense “am” all together creates “I was eating.” A conjugated verb can stand in for a complete sentence because it has the person information of the subject attached to the end; however, the subject is often used, for example the fuller form of the previous sentence is ami kha-cch-il-am “I was eating” where ami means “I”.

The citation or dictionary form of Bangla verbs come as verbal noun which corresponds to English gerunds, for instance eating, drinking, and sleeping as in the sentence “Eating, drinking, and sleeping are all he does every day.” However, for convenience we will use English citation or dictionary forms, for instance “to eat”, “to drink”, “to sleep” and so on to translate or gloss Bangla verbal nouns. A verbal noun consists of the verb root and a suffix. Based on the suffixes they are divided in to three categories -a ending verbs, for examples khol-a “open”, lekh-a “to write”, -oa ending verbs, for example kha-oa “to eat”, ja-oa “to go”, and -no ending verbs, for example ghuma-no “to sleep”, patha-no “to send”. To reiterate, only the verb root take part in the verb conjugation, and the verbal noun are used as nouns like the gerunds in English.