Dim-wittery unbounded.
- Nagari itself is a derivative of Brahmi. Getting away from Bengali script to the Devnagari derived Hindi script is as complete a piece of nonsense as can be imagined.
- There are half-baked conclusions being drawn from the records available of the Bengali language.
- The Bengali script existed before the Bengali language. It was used as a common script all over eastern India and was not peculiar to Bengali. Far from it.
- Some fairly stupid commentators have jumped to the conclusion that the use of a similar script in Assamese, and in other eastern languages, indicates that those languages were derived from Bengali. Not so. They were all, including Bengali, derived from a common source, Magadhi Prakrit.
- Bengali emerged first, in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, and the early phases overlapped with the collapse of the Sena kingdom and the introduction of first, a province of the Delhi Sultanate, next, an independent Sultanate, whose princes had the khutba read in their name.
- Early Bengali acquired loan words very early, by the 14th century, but for nearly four centuries, during the 10th, 11th, 12th and 13th centuries, it developed within itself, in association with other cognate languages also at that time slowly going away from Magadhi Prakrit.
- From the 14th to the 18th centuries, till the British burst onto the scene, there was an increasing use of Persian at court. This was Persian, not Persianised Bengali.
- There was an increased use of Persian words by all classes of society, not just the courtier and administrative classes.
- There were sporadic instances of the use of right-to-left script during this period, but nothing on the scale of a mass movement.
- The British put their own twist on things; they surveyed and 'rationalised' the language. That they 'sanskritised' the language is not impossible, but is highly improbable.
- It seems rather more accurate to ascribe the 'sanskritisation' of the language, if it occurred, to the period immediately following the British political advent, and to look to the generations of Bengali middle-class promoters of the Bengal Renaissance for its main promoters.
Ironically, this is called sanskritisation, whereas it was already a hybridised language that was used as a base for the elimination of loan words. It is moot whether the process should be called sanskritisation or de-Persianisation.
- The reaction to this was the movement known as Musulmani Bangla. This was short-lived, in the 19th century, and commencement of the 20th century, and it seems that most of the Bengali population, irrespective of religion or location, used a hybridised spoken language and a sanskritised written language. Over time, the differences between spoken and written language disappeared; they converged and the written form became a modified version of the spoken.
- It was at this stage of development that partition took place. The language riots firmly underlined the commitment of the educated classes to the Bengali language proper, indirectly, to the script as well.
IT WAS THIS TABULA RASA THAT IS THE STARTING POINT FOR THE PRESENT THREAD.
1. Its just a suggestion, so future generations will not have the need to maintain and learn two different scripts.
2.
1. Bengali script could be preexisting, before the evolution of Bangla language, none of us said anything about when it came into being
2. I am not sure who made such assertions, I personally knew that Bangla and Assamese come from same Prakrit root and share script and that Assamese did not derive from Bengali, not sure where you are getting these
3. ok
4. you are describing old Bengali (900/1000-1300)
5. 1300-1757 Persian was court language in Bengal as it was in Delhi, agreed
6. Persian, as well as Arabic (and Turkic to a smaller extent) loan words spread among all classes, naturally due to presence of Persian/Turkic/Arabic speakers (migrants from various parts of then Muslim world)
7. sporadic use is correct, because writing itself was a very limited activity and since Persian was legal and court language, perhaps those Muslim rulers did not feel the need to change the script of Bangla to Nastaliq as it was done for Khariboli/Urdu and Punjabi (Shahmukhi) etc. This is an unfinished business in our view that happened with majority Islamic people of the world, where the script was changed to some form of Arabic
8, 9 and 10.
http://www2.nau.edu/~jmw22/cv/ArabicLoanwords.pdf
"Abdul Mannan, who wrote the definitive treatment of dobhasi literature in 1966, sees its origins in earlier Mughal patronage of Bengali. The first work on record “which has preserved evidence of the influence of the language of Muslim rulers [on Bengali] is the Mansavijay of Bipradàs Piplài”, a Brahmin (ca. 1495 C.E., Mannan 1966:59). Bharat Chandra wrote the following
(from Onnodamongol):
na robe prosad gun/. [Persian, Arabic, Hindustani]
na hobe rosal lack grace and poetic quality.
ot eb o kohi bhasa
I have chosen, therefore, the yaboni misal the mixed language of the Muslims.
ye hok se hok bhasa The ancient sages have
kavyo ros loye declared: “Any language may be used. The important thing is poetic quality” (Mannan 1966: 69–70; emphasis added)
This precolonial aesthetic of mixture gave way to a drive for purification. In the 19th century, dobhasi Bengali borrowed even more Perso-Arabic lexemes, perhaps (ironically) reflecting forces unleashed by Halhed’s (1969/1778) Grammar of the Bengal Language. Halhed considered foreign elements pollutants in the “pure Bengalese”. He acknowledged “the modern [mixed] jargon of the kingdom” but declared the loanwords unintelligible outside large cosmopolitan towns (1969:xiv). Following Halhed’s lead, British Orientalists and Hindu pundits working in Calcutta (Ft. William College) produced a Sanskritized register successfully promulgated as “standard Bengali”. The intensification of Perso-Arabic borrowings in 19th-century dobhasi was thus a reaction to Orientalism and the Sanskritization of Bengali. As emerging Hindu and Muslim leaders competed for populist appeal, they declared the others’ favored register (Sanskritized vs. dobhasi)“unintelligible to the masses”.
Some of Halhed’s successors – e.g. William Carey – at least for a time rejected linguistic purism. “A multitude of words, originally Persian or Arabic, are constantly employed in common conversation, which perhaps ought to be considered as enriching rather than corrupting the language” (Carey 1801:iii; emphasis in original). But Qayyum (1981) notes that later editions of Carey’s Grammar omitted these words. Around 1850, British missionary James Long dubbed the Islamized form of Bengali “Musalman Bengali” (later called Musalmani Bangla – a form relevant to producing targeted translations of the Bible). Around 1900, members of the Hindu Bengali intelligentsia, such as Dinesh Chandra Sen and Rabindranath Tagore, made “Bengali literature” central to their “romantic nationalism” (Chakrabarty 2004). They believed that “the national [Bengali] literature” could engender a mystical union of the divergent groups of Bengali speakers, transcending the Hindu-Muslim divide. While they somewhat naively advocated this vision, Muslims in the united British Indian state of Bengal formed a Muslim Literary Association (1911), sensing that the Bengal Literary Academy (formed in 1893) was in some subtle way simply a “Hindu Bengali Literature Society”. But it was subtle. Hindu romantic nationalists did not advocate anything like the expurgation of Perso-Arabic words from Bengali. That was not what alienated Muslim literary figures. What the Hindu romanticists did so successfully was to promulgate a lexically Sanskritized Bengali that somehow appeared to be both the unmarked form of the language and the prestige variety."
I think the above paragraph describes clearly what Musalmani Bangla was:
The intensification of Perso-Arabic borrowings in 19th-century dobhasi was thus a reaction to Orientalism and the Sanskritization of Bengali.
But the thrust of our message always have been to go back to a much earlier root of Bangla or Middle Bangla (1300-1757), which is the Yaboni Mishal (Yabon is slur word for Muslims and Mishal means mixture) or Dobhasi as described in the first part of the paragraph, which Halhed then set out to purify at Fort William college. Perhaps I and others have incorrectly called 1300-1757 Middle Bangla as Musalmani Bangla and we should thank you for correcting that mistake.
Again we never claimed that Nastaliq was used widely for Bangla (sporadically as you said and as the above paper indicates), it definitely was used widely for Persian as the court language, so people were familiar with it, but then Persian was abolished after 1757. So that abruptly ended our connection with Nastaliq, which would not have happened, if Muslim rulers prior to 1757 made efforts to change the script of Bangla language from native Bangla to Nastaliq, and did not keep use of Nastaliq limited to Persian only.
11. Post 1947 partition, it was our earlier generations that went through 1952 language movement, where Golam Azam was a prominent participant, lets not get into that part of history in this thread, it is controversial at best. Nothing has been concluded then about the script of the language. The script of a living language of a living people can be changed at any time if the population and their learned experts/professionals feel, after proper research and cost/benefit analysis that there is need for a such a change. Our job was to float an idea and initiate a public debate, not to bring the debate to a conclusion. That will be left for professionals in the field and of course ultimately the people of Bangladesh.
The main ideas are:
- to remove the effect of colonial rule 1757-1947 in Bangla language
- to remove archaic and difficult Sanskrit Tatsama words that were introduced during Sanskritization 1757-1947
- to chart a new direction for Bangla language that draws its strength from middle Bangla (1300-1757) as its real roots
- to introduce Nastaliq and perhaps English as new alternate scripts for experimentation
- to introduce Arabic, Persian, Turkic as well as English loan words that will be practical for our interaction with the Muslim world and global cultures
Best wishes.
