The Phonemic and Morphemic Frequencies of the Bengali Language (An Old and Rare with Pin Holed)

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The study of the phonemic and morphemic frequencies of the Bengali language was undertaken by me in the 1980s. My friend. Professor Bhabesh Maitra, helped me a lot toward financial assistance. He took me to the then minister, primary and secondary education, Professor Partha De, who also encouraged me and helped me towards the implementation of the project. Professor De sanctioned funding for the first part of the projects. This enabled me to invite Professor Nikhilesh Bhattacharya of Indian Statistical Institute for statistical assistance and Sri Subhas Chandra Kundu, computer scientist of the same Institute, for software data processing. For the second part of the project Sri Kanti Biswas, minister, primary and secondary education, agreed to assist us for financial help. This was the preliminary arrangements for the completion of the project.

It is to be noted that the linguistics or the scientific study of language, covering the structure, i.e. phonetics and phonology. grammar and morphology as well as "the history of languages to each other and the cultural place of language in human behaviour" has a long history. Language was studied mainly as a field of philosophy before the nineteenth century. Among the philosophers who were interested in language was Wilhelm Von Humboldt. He considered "language an activity that arises spontaneously from the human spirit." He also felt that "languages are different just as the characteristics of individuals are different." In 1786, the founder of the Asiatic Society, Sir William Jones, "suggested the possible affinity of Sanskrit and Persian with Greek and Latin" and for the first time brought "to light genetic relations between languages." " As a result of "Jones's revelation the school of comparative historical linguistics" emerged.

At a later period other noted linguists developed the study of language the comparison of language structures". In fact, the 19th century European linguists like Jokob Grimm, Rasmus Rask, Karl Brugmann and Antoini Meillet and the American William Dwight Whitney played an important part in the development of the "existence of the Indo-European family of languages.

The principal aim of this study was to throw up frequency counts of words, syllables, phonemes, graphemes etc used in modern Bengali prose based on representative samples of writing (a) in newspapers and (b) in juvenile literature for children and adolescents. Such counts provide essential and reliable information of a statistical linguistic nature about the structure of the Bengali language.

It has been recognized very early-vide Dewey, G. (1923): Relative Frequencies of English Speech Sounds, where the commonest words in English prose are listed, based on a count of 100,000 words-that the list of words used depends critically on the type of material used for the word count. It follows that there is nothing like a general-purpose word count, and every word count should be based on appropriately selected language material and the selection would be made keeping the possible use of the word count very clearly in the foreground.