বাংলা ব্যাকরণ চর্চার প্রারম্ভিক পর্ব ও পাঁচ বৈয়াকরণ / Bangla Byakarancharchar Prarambhik Parba O Panch Baiyakaran

Abstract

The initiation of Bengali grammatical studies was driven by colonial imperatives and began under the aegis of foreign scholars. The credit for composing the first Bengali grammar is generally attributed to the Portuguese priest Manuel da Assumpção. His work, Vocabulario em idioma Bengalla e Portuguez dividido em dues partes, written in Portuguese using the Roman script in 1734, was published in 1743 from Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. The work is divided into two parts: the first outlines various grammatical principles of the Bengali language, while the second contains a Bengali–Portuguese and Portuguese–Bengali glossary.

         The second major grammatical work related to Bengali is A Grammar of the Bengal Language, also known as Bodhprakāśaṁ Śabdaśāstraṁ, authored by Nathaniel Brassey Halhed. Composed firingginām upakārārtham (for the benefit of Europeans), this grammar was intended primarily to enable employees of the East India Company to acquire proficiency in Bengali for commercial purposes. Written in 1778, the work is notable for being the first Bengali grammar to employ the Bengali script.

         Another significant contribution to Bengali grammatical history is William Carey’s A Grammar of the Bengalee Language, published in 1801. Alongside the works of Manuel and Halhed, Carey’s grammar represents a distinct and influential phase in the development of Bengali grammatical studies. Subsequently, Rammohan Roy’s Gauṛīya Vyākaraṇa played an important role in shaping Bengali grammatical discourse; this work was published posthumously in 1833.

         In 1850, Shyama Churun Sircar, with the objective of teaching Bengali grammar to English-proficient learners, authored Introduction to the Bengalee Language, Adapted to Students Who Know English, in Two Parts. A Bengali version of this work was published in 1852 under the title Bangla Byākaraṇa.

The early phase of Bengali grammatical studies reveals a pronounced influence of Sanskrit and English grammatical traditions. From the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, both indigenous and foreign grammarians largely adopted either Latin–English grammatical models or the framework of Sanskrit grammar. Although these works demonstrate a degree of analytical insight, they generally fail to move beyond inherited grammatical paradigms in order to identify and articulate the intrinsic rules and syntactic structures specific to the Bengali language.