Ghosh Upasika. Extended Sanskrit grammar and the first indigenous description of Bengali

Université Paris Cité, 2023. — 340 p.The thesis, titled "Extended Sanskrit Grammar and the First Indigenous Description of Bengali", focuses on a manuscript of Bengali grammar presumed to have been written in the first half of the nineteenth century. This manuscript lacks a colophon, thus leaving its authorship and exact date unconfirmed. It forms part of a larger manuscript currently held in the British Library in London. The present research work has two primary objectives: Firstly, to carefully examine the manuscript, to attempt to identify its author and the period of its composition, and to determine the role of this grammatical text in the historical development of the Bengali language; secondly, to uncover the Sanskrit models and tools used in this Bengali grammar. This research shows that there are multiple possibilities concerning the authorship of the manuscript, and it was likely to have been composed during the early years of the nineteen century. The determination of the role played by this grammatical text in the historical development of the Bengali language is closely linked to the status of the Bengali language at the beginning of the 19th century. The linguistic situation of Bengali is diglossic. The gap between the oral and written varieties was particularly noticeable from the period covering the 19th up to the mid-20th century when the written standard was eventually brought closer to the spoken one. Up to the colonial period, the vast majority of Bengali texts were in verse and the language of these texts, today called Middle Bengali, was never standardized nor became the object of grammatical descriptions. The establishment of Fort William College in Calcutta in 1800 spurred the emergence of numerous prose compositions in Indian vernacular languages. This institution encouraged in carrying out of philological works such as editing of various manuscripts, translation of texts, and production of at least one grammar and one dictionary in each language department between 1801 and 1805. This development played a pivotal role in shaping a standardized prose style for vernacular languages, including Bengali. During this process of standardization, Sanskrit played a significant role. Composed within the milieu of Fort William College, this grammar studied in the thesis can be seen as an attempt to standardize a linguistic variety undergoing a transformative phase towards an entirely new prose style. This grammar also testifies to the emergence of a terminology intended to bring into existence the diglossia that would characterize Bengali up to this day. The second objective of the thesis is linked to the concept of "extended grammar", and more precisely to the concept of, "extended Sanskrit grammar". By "extended grammars," we refer to the grammatical description of a language A using tools initially developed for a language B (Aurox 1994). In the history of the description of the Bengali language, the grammar studied in the research represents the first grammar of Bengali, written in Bengali, and in Bengali script; it uses grammatical tools developed for Sanskrit (it, therefore, provides an excellent case study of extended Sanskrit grammar), while identifying (and naming using terminology) features specific to Bengali. The grammar covers phonology, morphology, and syntax. These topics include an introduction to the Bengali alphabet system, sandhi, parts of speech, rules of sentence formation, pronunciation of sound units, compound words, and numbers. This research contributes significantly 1) to the history of the standardization of the Bengali language and 2) to the study of the influence of Sanskrit descriptive models developed (in Sanskrit) for Sanskrit on the description of the other languages of the Indian subcontinent.