Pabitra Sarkar

Although Rammohun Roy was notably many things, he was not an unlikely person to write a grammar—or, in fact, two grammars: one in English and one in Bangla, the latter being a free translation of the former.

‘Academy’, as many of us know, is a word that comes from the French word ‘academie’, evolving from Latin ‘academia’—the ultimate ancestor of both being Greek ‘akademeia’.

Haraprasad Shastri (1853-1931, Bhattacharya was the original family name) was a Sanskrit scholar, commonly referred to as a ‘pundit.

The very fact that a language identifies and defines a specific human group often leads to controversies and conflicts.

I belong to a generation that was overtaken by the pestilence called Partition.

Dr Shahidullah is one of the greatest linguists that the South Asian region has produced. This is a universally acknowledged fact and one can easily use it as the beginning statement of an article on him.

If you look for a definition of the word ‘nationalism’ on Google, or in an encyclopedia, you will find quite a few.  However, this word, like many such words, is ‘notorious’ in its own way, as no single definition seems to define it thoroughly.

From the later decades of the last century, a new worry has descended on mankind — that about the endurance, decay and death of the language.

All of you know about the squirrel from the Ramayana, who rolled himself on the sand at the Indian seashore and then dipped into the Indian Ocean, to shed the sand off its body on the presumption that he was helping to build the bridge across the sea that would enable Rama’s forces to reach Lanka.