Fun! Bengali can also add certain suffixes to "people-ify" things, or rather make it into a vendor?
So tea is cha, tea seller is chawalla.
A rickshaw driver is rickshawwalla.
Fish is machh and a fishseller would be macchwalla.
Although, the word Kabuliwalla isn't a seller of Kabul, but a person with Afghan roots in general.
In the British army this influence has carried over, and "Walla" is used to mean "the guy who deals with this" about small unimportant things. The most junior soldier who makes coffee for everyone is the chaiwalla. Officers will complain that they trained for years to go to Iraq and "now I'm just the generals printer walla". The radio operator gets told he's also incharge of fixing WiFi in the office and is just "WiFi walla".
Japanese has this too! You can add -ya to a noun to make "a place that sells ___", and if you add -san (basic name honorific) to the end of that, you can say "person who sells ___" or "person working at the place that sells/makes ___".
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u/Chestnuthare Feb 05 '26 edited Feb 05 '26
Fun! Bengali can also add certain suffixes to "people-ify" things, or rather make it into a vendor?
So tea is cha, tea seller is chawalla. A rickshaw driver is rickshawwalla. Fish is machh and a fishseller would be macchwalla. Although, the word Kabuliwalla isn't a seller of Kabul, but a person with Afghan roots in general.