Bengalee

An inhabitant of Bengal. B. Language. The B. , spoken by a pop. of more than 20 millions, spread over a territory of about 100,000 sq. m., is, like the numerous vernacular dialects spoken in N. India, apparently descended from the ancient cla ical language of the country, the Sanskrit. Its alphabet comprises 14 vowels and diphthongs, and 33 consonants. The ground-work of the B. language is altogether Sanskrit, just as that of the Italian or Spanish is Latin, with a comparatively small addition of words which cannot be traced to that source. But the refined system of grammatical inflexions, which constitute so prominent a characteristic of the Sanskrit language, has in B. almost entirely disappeared; and the want of terminations, marking the cases and numbers of the noun, or the persons and tenses of the verb, is supplied by particles and other auxiliary words, often rather clumsily subjoined (hardly ever prefixed) to the mutilated stems of San skrit words. Bengalese', n . pl . The natives of Bengal.