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Bengali grammar wheels
Grammar Wheels
"I gave my three books to her at the market." — Change any wheels to see how Bengali encodes each shift.
Common questions about Bengali
What can I toggle on the Bengali wheel?
Subject (person, number, and three honorific levels), tense (present, past, future), aspect (simple, progressive, perfect), mood (declarative, question, command), polarity, definiteness, and register. Each spin rebuilds the verb form in Bengali script with a transliteration.
How do the three honorific levels work?
Bengali distinguishes তুই (intimate or junior), তুমি (peers and family), and আপনি (respectful or formal). Switching the register dial flips both the pronoun and the verb ending — the same root takes a different inflection at each level.
Does switching subject gender change the verb?
No. Bengali verbs agree with person and honorific level but not with grammatical gender, so toggling a masculine speaker to a feminine one leaves the verb form unchanged. The pronoun and any agreeing adjectives still shift.
How does definiteness show up on the wheel?
Toggling a noun to definite attaches the classifier suffix -টা (or honorific -টি), so বই 'a book' becomes বইটা 'the book'. Switching back strips the suffix.
Can I use the wheel without reading the Bengali script?
Each generated sentence shows Bengali script, a transliteration, a word-by-word gloss, and an English translation. The same characters reappear under each spin, so the script becomes familiar over time.
Sources for Bengali
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Thompson, Hanne-Ruth (2012). Bengali: A Comprehensive Grammar. London: Routledge.
- Masica, Colin P. (1991). The Indo-Aryan Languages. Cambridge University Press.
- Khan, Sameer ud Dowla (2010). "Bengali (Bangladeshi Standard)." Journal of the International Phonetic Association 40(2): 221–225.
- Rácová, Anna (2007). "Classifiers in Bengali." Asian and African Studies 16(2): 125–137.
- Chatterji, Suniti Kumar (1926). The Origin and Development of the Bengali Language. Calcutta University Press.