u/nasazgar

Hello! I am a native Hindi-speaker from Delhi and a self-taught reader of Bangla. I learned the script for personal interest, and since then I've come to passively understand most written Bangla mostly through repeated exposure. I've been trying to read full-length texts in the language, but as of now have only read short stories. I found a collection of horror stories ('Shuktara'r 101 Bhut'er Golpo, published in 3 volumes I think, I have one) and have reached the point where I don't need to look things up to get through a story. That said, I don't feel prepared for high-brow 'literary' Bangla either, as multiple attempts at stories from Golpoguchho made clear to me.

I was hoping for recommendations for fiction written in Bangla that isn't overly 'high-brow'. Albeit aimed at readers of all ages or at adults (no kid literature please).

I would highly prefer something based in Bengal.

Looking forward to hearing from all you, ক্ষমা করবেন, এবার পোস্টটা বাংলায় লিখতে পারলাম না। এখনো আমাকে একটু প্র্যাক্টিস করতে হবে।

A discussion with a friend made me think of this.

There are of course uncountable words in Urdu which have retroflex consonants, those that with some rare exceptions do not exist outside South Asia, and are generally thought of as the result of Dravidian influence (Brahui, Tamil et al) on the Indo-Aryan language family (Urdu, Sindhi, Punjabi et al). ‘Retroflex’ describes a sound that is made by curling the tongue backwards against the roof of the mouth, and generally we write them in Urdu with a mini toein /ط in superscript.

Given that these sounds are exclusive to South Asian languages, it would seem logical that words that have a ڈ ٹ ڑ in them are of desi etymology.

However, there are multiple words in Urdu that have one of these sounds, along with a sound that’s distinctively Perso-Arabic in origin.

غنڈا, پٹخنا، چٹخارہ، پٹاخہ

I’m wondering how these modern spellings of these words came to be. I tried searching for etymologies of all of these words, and most sources describe all of them, as the retroflex consonants would predict, as of Desi origin, either Sanskrit via Prakrit (پٹاخہ، پٹخنا ) or even Marathi (غنڈا ). The equivalent words in Urdu’s sister languages do not seem to ever use their equivalent of غ خ et al in the spellings.

How did Urdu come to add Perso-Arabic sounds to these non Perso-Arabic words?