Building a "Starter" Vocabulary in Bangla

Most Common Words in Bangla

Many lists of the Top 100 English words are available on the internet. For example, the http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists list provides an useful source. These lists are compiled by analysing a large body of text (called a corpus). Unfortunately such a corpus does not yet exist for Bangla. I had to find a different way to derive such list for Bangla Words.

I came across a site called wordcount.org. It is described this way.

WordCount™ is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonness. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.

WordCount data currently comes from the British National Corpus®, a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent an accurate cross-section of current English usage. WordCount includes all words that occur at least twice in the BNC®. In the future, WordCount will be modified to track word usage within any desired text, website, and eventually the entire Internet.

This approach has a few drawbacks.

1. The list does not have the Part of Speech (POS) associated with each word. Many words change meaning based on its usage in a sentence. For instance the word "can" could be used as in "he stored money in a tin can" or as in "I can do this". Each identified word had to be assigned a POS before translation.
2. The most common English word is the Determiner "the" as in "the dog". In Bangla, the Determiner "the" is implemented as a suffix "-Ta" to the noun, as in "the dog" -> "kukur-Ta". Similarly, "this dog" -> "ei kukur-Ta" and "that dog" -> "OI kukur-Ta". So there may not be a one-to-one correspondence between a word in English and its implementation in Bangla.
3. Verbs conjugate differently in English and Bangla. For example, the Past tense of "I eat" is "I ate" in English. Verbs in Bangla are conjugated based on Person and Tense. The root verb "khaoya" can be conjugated into 24 different forms. So we have to be careful in dealing with Verbs when translating words.

With the above in mind, and since I was deriving these words for English speakers trying to learn Bangla, I have used the following process.

1. Start with the top 100 English Words from wordcount.org
2. Assign the most common Part of Speech to each word
3. Sort the list by POS
4. For each Part of Speech, translate the English Word to Bangla
5. For completeness, consider the antonym (opposite) word and add it to the list. For example, if you have the word "near", add the word "far" since in some cases a negative can be used to produce the same meaning. So "not far" is similar to "near" in meaning and a writer may write it in either way.
6. For Nouns, words need to be grouped, based on what person, place or thing they describe. The number of Nouns in the top 100 is very limited. Some common categories of Nouns need to be added, like Parts of the human body, ponts of the compass, common animals, common birds, common foodstuff, nature and Bangla numerals.

Most Used Words in English

These 214 words in Bangla, derived from the process described above, are MUST LEARN words for anyone learning to speak conversational Bangla.

By Part of Speech