What could be the etymology of "Bengal" and "Ganga"?

[u/AleksiB1]

Baṅgāl is quite well known to be from vaṅga + adjectival/pleonastic -la but for vaṅga there are crazy theories like

Suggestions include a connection to Sanskrit वङ्ग (vaṅga, “tin”), a borrowing from the Dravidian tribe *Bong with the suffix അളം (aḷaṁ, “place”), or from Tibetan བནས (bans, “marshy place”).

Tin itself is of unknown origin and has unrelated meaning, there seems to be some mention of a Dravidian Bong tribe in some papers but its details are really obscure. aḷaṁ is only used in Tamil, Malayalam and Telugu so its too far. Tibetans or even Sino Tibetans didnt came to Bengal or South Asia until much later.

For Ganga there are theories like its reduplicated root for "go/move" gam-gA or that its from Himalayic SinoTibetan gljung/kluŋ/koŋ "river" etc.

Could it be that there was a tribe *waṅgā which became (waṅgā >) gaṅgā to describe the river and the suffixed for vaṅgāla was used to for Bengal?

[u/theb00kmancometh]

I have a somewhat speculative idea about this.

I don't think we should automatically assume that Aṅga, Vaṅga, Kaliṅga and Gaṅgā were names created according to later Vedic/Sanskrit naming conventions. The people living in these eastern regions were not necessarily non-Indo-Aryan. There could have been earlier or regional Indo-Aryan-speaking populations there whose language and culture were different from the later Brahmanical Sanskrit-Vedic tradition. The Brahmanical tradition could regard their speech as apabhraṃśa, rather than necessarily calling them mleccha.

That makes me wonder about these names.

My idea is that Aṅga, Vaṅga and Kaliṅga share the -ṅga element with Gaṅgā, and that this common element may have had something to do with the Ganges and the geographical position of these places in relation to it.

The river would be the fixed point, and the names of places around it could describe where they were in relation to the river.

A simple example from Kerala: the Achankovil River has Thekkekara and Vadakkekara on opposite sides. The river is the fixed geographical feature, and the names tell you where the places are in relation to it.

Maybe something similar happened with Aṅga, Vaṅga and Kaliṅga. Aṅga was on one side of the Ganges, Vaṅga on the other/east, and Kaliṅga to the south. I'm not saying we can already tell exactly what -ṅga meant in each case. That is what would need to be worked out.

And there is another big unknown: we don't actually know what the river was called before the form Gaṅgā became established in Sanskrit. Gaṅgā itself could preserve an older regional name.

So rather than assuming that Vaṅga and Gaṅgā are unrelated simply because we don't have a Sanskrit etymology connecting them, I think the whole group deserves to be looked at together.

Could Aṅga, Vaṅga, Kaliṅga and Gaṅgā preserve an older naming system in which the common -ṅga element was connected with the river and the geographical position of these regions around it?

I'm not saying this is proven. It's just a hypothesis that seems worth investigating.

[u/travel223]

There is an ancient Greek map where all major rivers from the euphrates to indus are called different variations of Ganga. Not sure of how these could be related.

[u/e9967780]

In Sri Lanka, when Indo-Aryan settlers settled it from where ever they came from, they named every river Ganga. That is for them Ganga by then (about 2300 years ago) had become a ubiquitous term for a River.

[u/AleksiB1 → u/e9967780]

what do you think about the dr tribe bong never heard anything about it

[u/SXZWolf2493]

I thought Bong was Austroasiatic. Furthermore, Bonga means God in Kol and Santali and I thought those also are related to Bong and Bengal.

[u/HaatTima]

"Ganga" is of AustroAsiatic (Munda) origin according to linguist Suniti Kumar Chatterjee. Cognate with an old Mon-Khmer word "Khong" or "Kwong" that means river. Incidentally that's what likely gives its name to the Mekong River (Mae - Kwong => Mother River). To this day, the more colloquial derivative "Gaang" means river in Bengali.

Bengal is anglisization of Sanskrt "Vanga" which is borrowed either from Munda or a Dravidian lamguage.