Walking past a local biryani shop or in a wedding venue, the aroma of Kacchi biryani melts our hearts in a second. Kacchi biryani is an Old Dhaka, or more popularly, a Puran Dhakaiya delicacy loved by all, as the dish has its fan base throughout the world. There are varieties.
Some things are clear. Bangla s core the bulk of its basic nouns like
hat (hand) and
pa (foot), its verbs and the way they re conjugated, the little pieces of hard-to-translate elements (and I don t mean so-called untranslatable words like
obhiman I mean little words like the
to in
bhalo korechho to!) these were all inherited from Bangla s ancestor language. But here I don t mean Sanskrit (or technically, Old Indo-Aryan), which ceased to be a spoken language by the 6th century BCE, well before the Indo-Aryan cultural world even reached Bengal. Given this gap of over 1500 years between spoken Sanskrit and Old Bangla, what is our linguistic ancestor?