What is the connection between Sylhet and London?

[Skallagrim]

My dad is from Narayangonj, when his side of family use their local dialect i find it hard to understand. Dialects are suppose to be different. There was a time when Assamese considered as a dialect of Bengali. They use the same script as us.

Is there any entry for 'Narayangonji' in Ethnologue or Wikipedia? What you're talking about is Mutual Intelligibility- another parameter for determining distinction/similarity between languages or dialects, which is a completely different aspect. Mutual Intelligibility is not only dependent on Lexical Similarity or Grammar but also on accent. Two languages or dialects may have the same grammar and >95% lexical similarity but may not be mutually intelligible because of accent. Anyway, I forgot to ask- what is your point?

 

[livingdead]

I say love story between London and Sylhet because almost every resident Sylheti have atleast one member in London. I have never met or heard about any Sylheti having no connection with London. Why are Sylhetis so obsessed with London?

@Saiful Islam, please share your London connection. Many PDF BD members are also living in London. You guys know better about it.

thats how migration happened in some parts of India too, for example punjabis are more likely to go to UK and canada. Other parts of India are less keen, telugus want to go to USA for example.

 

[Skallagrim]

My dad is from Narayangonj, when his side of family use their local dialect i find it hard to understand. Dialects are suppose to be different. There was a time when Assamese considered as a dialect of Bengali. They use the same script as us. They even claim Charyapada as their languages early example.



Shah Suza took refuge in Arakan where he was betrayer and killed. Khan Jahan Ali might be a example you are looking for,

Khan Jahan, a noble under the Tughlaqs, seems to have come to Bengal just after the sack of Delhi (1398) by Timur. He acquired the forest area of the Sundarbans asjagir (fief) from the sultan of Delhi and subsequently from the sultan of Bengal. He cleared up the dense forest in the Sundarban area to set up human settlements.

He ruled over an area called Khalifatabad stretching up to Naldi to the north of Narail.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Jahan_Ali.

Shah Suja took refuge in Tripura too at times. Check his biography in Wikipedia.

 

[livingdead]

I also live in London and let me tell you that Tower Hamlets in East London is chocked full of Bangladeshis. They stink the place out and have made the area filthy.

tower hamlet is bloody expensive now after docklands regeneration. I have been there, its not bad.

 

[A Town]

thats how migration happened in some parts of India too, for example punjabis are more likely to go to UK and canada. Other parts of India are less keen, telugus want to go to USA for example.

Gujaratis, especially from Uganda came to the UK in massive numbers.

 

[livingdead]

Gujaratis, especially from Uganda came to the UK in massive numbers.

that was a forced migration, in case of punjabis its economic migration. One person goes to UK, and becomes richest man in the village, guess what rest of villagers want.

 

[EAK]

I don't know about sylhet but here they call MIRPUR (Pakistan AJK) a mini london

 

[Skallagrim]

l
@ Who says that you have no knowlege. You have nicely expressed the real facts of Sylheti people. It does not mean that we are underming the Sylheti people.

@ Finally thanks for revealing the truth that Suja's soldiers took shelter in Trippura. Time again I am pleading that Bengal had been a safe heaven for the muslim fugitives not only the Indian Sub-continents but also for the muslims of Middle-East.

@ About the "Syloti Nagri", yes I have gone through it but hardly I understand. Basically, the muslims of Bengal did not had any written language. They used to express in Bengali but never went deep to study the "Sanscret". More so who would taught them ????? So, a different oral language being inspired by the Persian and Arabian scholars invented in East Bengal known as " Puthir Gan". The "Syloti Nagri" is one of such "Puthi".

@ This "Puthir Gan" played a very vital role in expreading the muslim culture, traditions, muslim history from generation to generation. And it continued for 3 centuries. And it became very popular within a very short period. Soon the Hindu scholar to counter this invented "Kobir Gan".

There's no ground for denying admixture but enumeration of the extent without genetic study is not reasonable. Yes indeed there are lots of Muslim Bengalis who one can definitely tell by the looks of them that they are not Hindu (meaning not 'pure' ethnic Bengali) but no noticeable phenotypal difference is there between an average Muslim Bengali and an average Hindu Bengali IMO.

Regarding the extinction of Syloti Nagri, the last nail in the coffin was put by the Bengali nationalists who burnt down the remaining Syloti Nagri printing presses in Sylhet in or around 1971 (google pls for the exact time).

 

[Skallagrim]

Syloti-Nagri alphabet

The Syloti-Nagri alphabet is related to the Kaithi alphabet of Bihar. The exact origins of the alphabet are unknown and the earliest surviving manuscripts dates from either 1549 or 1774 (the date is given within the manuscript though the text is not clear at that point).

The traditionally story of the origin of the Syloti-Nagri alphabet is that it was developed around the beginning of the 14th century by Saint Shahjalal and his 360 saintly companions, most of whom were Arabic speakers. Other scripts used at the time were deemed unsuitable for the Sylheti language.

In the late 17th century, Persian became the official language of the Delhi Sultanate and the Perso-Arabic script was used in all official documents. The Sylheti language and alphabet continued to be used by the ordinary people for everyday matters.

In the 1860s, a Sylheti by the name of Moulvi Abdul Karim spent several years in Europe and learnt the printing trade. After returning home, he designed a woodblock type for the Syloti-Nagri alphabet and founded the Islamia Press in Sylhet Town in about 1870. Other Sylheti presses were established in Sunamgonj, Shillong and Calcutta. These presses fell out of use during the early 1970s. Since then the Syloti-Nagri alphabet has been used mainly by linguists and academics.

Notable features

The alphabet is written in horizontal lines from left to right, but Sylheti books are paginated from right to left. This means that the front cover of a Sylhettan book is where the back cover of an English book would be.

This is a syllabic alphabet in which consonants all have an inherent vowel. Other vowels are indicated with diacritics or separate letters. The inherent vowel can be muted with a special diacritic called a hasanta.

Vowels can be written as independent letters, or by using a variety of diacritical marks which are written above, below, before or after the consonant they belong to.

When consonants occur together in clusters, special conjunct letters are used. The letters for the consonants other than the final one in the group are reduced. The inherent vowel only applies to the final consonant.

Syloti-Nagri alphabet


page 1

ALI - Syloti Sylheti Nagri Books

 

[IamBengali]

@ Well as per my experience, the Sylheti's never considered themselve as a Bengali. They considered that their Sylhet has a differnt langauge.

Thats true. Sylheti dialect is so alien to Bangla language. Its like a whole different language.

Campaigns started to rise in London during the mid-1970s to mid-1980s to recognize Sylheti as a language on its own right. During the mid-1970s, when the first mother-tongue classes were established for Bangladeshis by a non-Sylheti, Nurul Islam, the classes were given in Bengali rather than the Sylheti dialect which triggered the campaign.

Sylheti language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Al-zakir]

I don't have good knowledge of everything you said here, but the following are true:

1. Even today Sylhetis esp the older ones, educated or illiterate, call the people of other greater districts of BD 'Bengali'.

2. Sylhetis rarely marry outside Sylhet. Sylheti Chowdhuries rarely marry off their sons or daughters to other Sylheties who are not genuine Chowdhuries or Syeds, let alone to other non-Sylheti people.

3. Sylheti cuisine is different from those of other areas in BD.

4. Lexical similarity between Sylheti and Bengali is 70% (while it is 60% between English and German) and linguists are divided in their opinion regarding whether Sylheti should be considered a seperate language or a dialect of Bengali. Many Sylheti words are common with Assamese. Pronunciations are more similar to Assamese than to Bengali, particles are unique, pronouns are gender specific. Lastly Sylheti had a different script (Syloti Nagri), many Punthis written in Syloti Nagri are existent. I hear of people from older generations who could read no other script other than Syloti Nagri.

5. Lastly one historical fact orally transmitted to next generations-Shah Suja's Army took refuge in Tripura while fleeing from his brothers and many of his men took local wives (Tripura is neighboring to BD and part of it fell in areas now part of BD).

You summed it up well. You forgot to mention our love for Islam. I believe all the Masjid/Madrasa build in UK/USA and other non-Islamic countries is by us. Go ahead and check the data?

 

[Md Akmal]

You summed it up well. You forgot to mention our love for Islam. I believe all the Masjid/Madrasa build in UK/USA and other non-Islamic countries is by us. Go ahead and check the data?

@ Hi @Al-zakir, how are you ? Here we are discussing about the Sylheti people but it does not mean that we are undermining the Sylheti people.Sylheti's are great. They played a tremendous role for the Pakistan movement in 1930's/40's and finally Pakistan came into being. Without Sylhet East Pakistan had nothing.

@ During the Liberation Movement on one hand majority Sylheti people collaborated with the Pakistan forces and in another side many went to join with the Liberation forces. The Sylheti's of Britain played a vitol role in creating a world opinion. Even I communicated with my family who were in West Pakistan through the Sylheti people who were settled in UK.

 

[khair_ctg]

I don't have good knowledge of everything you said here, but the following are true:

1. Even today Sylhetis esp the older ones, educated or illiterate, call the people of other greater districts of BD 'Bengali'.

2. Sylhetis rarely marry outside Sylhet. Sylheti Chowdhuries rarely marry off their sons or daughters to other Sylheties who are not genuine Chowdhuries or Syeds, let alone to other non-Sylheti people.

3. Sylheti cuisine is different from those of other areas in BD.

4. Lexical similarity between Sylheti and Bengali is 70% (while it is 60% between English and German) and linguists are divided in their opinion regarding whether Sylheti should be considered a seperate language or a dialect of Bengali. Many Sylheti words are common with Assamese. Pronunciations are more similar to Assamese than to Bengali, particles are unique, pronouns are gender specific. Lastly Sylheti had a different script (Syloti Nagri), many Punthis written in Syloti Nagri are existent. I hear of people from older generations who could read no other script other than Syloti Nagri.

5. Lastly one historical fact orally transmitted to next generations-Shah Suja's Army took refuge in Tripura while fleeing from his brothers and many of his men took local wives (Tripura is neighboring to BD and part of it fell in areas now part of BD).

so what i understand is that Sylheti had a standardised Devnagri script, which is different from Calcutta based script. and other dialects like Chatgaia did not have their standardized Devnagri or Nastaliq script? but isn't "Bengali" of historical E. Bengal-Pakistan/Bangladesh a mixture of mostly various spoken dialects that are either mutually intelligible or not mutually intelligible? in that way is Sylheti as "separate" as Chatgaia or even Noakhailla?

 

[Saiful Islam]

Sylheti language in general is very harsh and rough in sound, for example other districts may pronounce it "kapor" Sylheti's would pronounce it "kha-for", we seem to emphasise on "kh" a lot. Sylheti isn't much different from other dialects, I wouldn't say it's a separate language however Assamese has had a big influence on it due to close proximity.

When I go to Shahjalal airport most of them don't understand me that's when I have to up my Bengali speaking skills lol.

But in my cable TV Star Plus (UK) channel shows all Bangladeshi ads in Hindi.

Most of the Star Plus adverts are put in by Southall and in general West London based businessmen so it's likely that they'll be Indian or Pakistani.

 

[Skallagrim]

so what i understand is that Sylheti had a standardised Devnagri script, which is different from Calcutta based script. and other dialects like Chatgaia did not have their standardized Devnagri or Nastaliq script? but isn't "Bengali" of historical E. Bengal-Pakistan/Bangladesh a mixture of mostly various spoken dialects that are either mutually intelligible or not mutually intelligible? in that way is Sylheti as "separate" as Chatgaia or even Noakhailla?

We are pointing out the differences between Bengali and Sylheti. As I mentioned in a previous post lexical similarity between Sylheti and Bengali is 70%, which is 60% between English and German, and 85% between Spanish and Italian. Percentages higher than 85% usually indicate that the two languages being compared are likely to be related dialects. (wiki) Now Chittagonian is even further removed from Bengali. It has 43-64% lexical similarity with Bengali. In Ethnologue or Wikipedia there's no mention of any other languages in BD that we usually consider a dialect of bengali.