Middle Bengali

English

Proper noun

Middle Bengali

1. The ancestor of New Bengali, spoken from 1200 CE to 1800, that developed from Old Bengali.

   Hypernym: New Indo-Aryan

   • 1926, Suniti Kumar Chatterji, The Origin and Development of the Bengali Language, Calcutta University Press, page 134:

     Literary Bengali of prose, during the greater part of the 19th century, was thus a doubly artificial language; and, with its forms belonging to Middle Bengali, and its vocabulary highly Sanskritised, it could only be compared to a ‘Modern English’ with a Chaucerian grammar and a super-Johnsonian vocabulary, if such a thing could be conceived.