Talk:Sylhetis

Request to change page name

I welcome, whoever created the page. Please fix following.

Sylhetis is wrong spelling of Sylhetese.

In English it is used as - ese, like Multese, Sudanese, Japanese. Anyone can write in Wikipedia but still educated admins should come forward to fix it.

In Native Syloti Language (Sylheti), people call them Sylotin (ꠍꠤꠟꠐꠤꠘ).

Sylhetese or Sylotin are correct terms. With due respect native word is also preferred from this two word for this page. Itrans issues (talk) 11:28, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Read WP:COMMONNAME again. The term Sylheti is much more common than Sylotin. See the use of Germans instead of the word Deutsche. Secondly, check articles like Gujaratis, Punjabis, and Bengalis, where a suffix -s is used with ethnic names. No Sylheti people = Sylhetis is absolutely fine. The suffix -ese is used for country demonyms used not ethnic groups. See Berbers for example. It is not Barbarese. - Fylindfotberserk (talk) 15:02, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

'Sylheti' (with the letters 'y' and 'h') like 'Bengali' (with the letter 'e') are both the British English spellings that have always existed in English since first colonial encounters. Most south Asian Indo-Aryan languages follow the [-i] ending. It is said as 'Hindi' language in Englsih, not 'Hind(i)ese' language. Please provide a references to where 'Sylhet(i)ese' is used in modern English.

It is current practice to borrow a word into a language like English without 'foreign' morphology, so to make the plural in English, the English plural [-s] is used, not the Siloti plural [-n]. It is 'octopus' - 'octopuses' in English.

However, translating the English term(s) into Sylheti (Siloti) language in parentheses after the English on the English language page, in various scripts with transriptions, as well as translations in Bangla to demonstrate the differences between Sylheti and Bangla, would be enriching additions.

Please add. Don't subtract or rewrite history.

P.S. The spelling 'Syloti', still with the non-south Asian 'y', which was written in the Unicode proposal, is foreign origin. The Unicode proposal was written by foreign British and Australian Bible translators. It is a type of hybrid reworking of the English 'Sylheti' and the Sylheti (Siloti) pronunciation that keeps with the already recognized ISO language code for Sylheti language, which is 'syl'. Like how the Bengali language 'Bangla' has taken on its transcription spelling, the transcription spelling of the Sylheti language would be 'Siloti', no 'y' letter.

195.195.176.198 (talk) 15:14, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

@Flyinforberserk Yes bro you are right. Perspective is when we are talking about a minority languages. Their words are always less heard then how others call them. Right? So we need to also consider that.

For Sylheti before the usage of Syloti Nagri script we commonly used Bengali terms. Now we use Syloti Language.

@195 Bengali =সিলেটি/sylheti Sylheti =ꠍꠤꠟꠐꠤ,ꠍꠤꠟꠐꠤꠘ (Siloti/Silotin) or (Syloti/Sylotin) English=Sylheti become Bengali সিলেটি, but doesn't match with Sylheti (Siloti or Syloti) Itrans issues (talk) 17:36, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

@Flyinforberserk, you have added good examples, I haven't thought about them. I was thinking most closest language "Assam-ese".

@195 We can use [-s] according to the English plural in our language Syloti[s] or Siloti[s] instead of matching common name in Bengali language. But as Wikipedia policy of common name. We might not able to fix it. As our language is replacing by Bengali words day by day. Itrans issues (talk) 18:06, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Marriage retuals

Both islamic and hindu culture has contributed to the formation of Sylhetti culture and marriage rituals,but hindu marriage rituals was doesnot mentioned earlier why,,and what is bengali and muslim weeding style,bengali is a culture but where as hindu and mluslim are religion and both contributed to the formation of Sylhetti culture.There is also a reference given from bdnews24.com Which mentioned different kind of marriage rituals according to religion but why it was made hojboj here..please kindly note it. Sukauka (talk) 07:57, 31 October 2020 (UTC)

Sylheti nagri script

In this article Sylheti Nagri script is claimed to be the script of Sylheti. This is incorrect for numerous reasons.

1. Sylheti Nagri script is not used by any Sylhetis, neither in Bangladesh nor India. The primary, and only, script used is the standard Bangla script. You can ask Sylhetis anywhere whether diaspora or India, nobody knows or uses the Sylheti Nagri script. Given this fact, claiming it is the Sylheti script is equivalent to the claim that Norse Runes are the script for Swedish or Norwegian and not the Latin alphabet even though all Swedes and Norwegians use the Latin alphabet to write. Sylheti Nagri is an ectinct script only used by academics who study linguistics. For this reason the script for Sylheti in this article should be changed to the standard Bangla script.

2. Sylheti Nagri script was not popular and was reserved to religious poetry (puthis). Most Sylhetis used the standard Bangla scriot which was used for most writing. Sylheti Nagri was not used in education nor has any formal documented use. If simply that it was used is enough to declare it the Sylheti script, it should also be declared the script for Bangla and Chatgaiya since it was used as far away as Kolkata and Chittagong. CorrectionalFacility101 (talk) 06:49, 22 April 2022 (UTC)

@Chaipau and UserNumber: Kinda confused regarding the usage of script in the lead and infobox. Wouldn't it be better if we remove the script from these locations as was in this version? We already have the IPA. - Fylindfotberserk (talk) 10:20, 22 April 2022 (UTC)

@Fylindfotberserk:, I don't know who was responsible for adding the script to the lead/infobox again, as that previous version was agreed upon for a while. UserNumber (talk) 14:00, 22 April 2022 (UTC)

@Fylindfotberserk and UserNumber: I agree. We should remove the fonts and replace by IPA whenever needed. It does not make sense to keep this font in other places either. Where absolutely necessary (writing system, for example), we could have an image with the alphabets. Chaipau (talk) 14:11, 22 April 2022 (UTC)

@Chaipau and UserNumber: I've removed the script form the lead and infobox. - Fylindfotberserk (talk) 14:14, 22 April 2022 (UTC)

Sylheti is not an ethno-cultural group

The article states that Sylheti is an ethnocultural group. This is false as Sylheti is not an ethnicity. It is a cultural group yes, but all Sylhetis identify as Bengali.

This can be seen from the fact that in both India and Bangladesh the Sylhetis identify as ethnically Bengali, as well as any diaspora Sylhetis that you ask. Unfortunately, the claim that it is an ethno- group does not reflect the ground reality of the Sylheti people whether anecdotally nor in what is clear in terms of ethnic identification in government documentations in any country on the planet. Nowhere on the planet, in any country, do Sylhetia identify as an ethnic groul nor as distinct from the Bengali ethnic group. They all identify as Bengalis.

For this reason, the article should be amended to state that Sylhetis are a cultural group found within the Bengali ethnic group or a sub-group of the Bengali ethnicity with ties to the Sylhet region of Bengal. CorrectionalFacility101 (talk) 06:56, 22 April 2022 (UTC)

I don't see a reason why the sourced term 'ethnocultural' needs to be changed. The subsequent lines explain more about it. Obviously there is a sense of distinctness as an ethno-XYZ group exists especially when assocaitions like Sylheti Sammelan Mumbai are present. - Fylindfotberserk (talk) 10:41, 22 April 2022 (UTC)

@Fylindfotberserk: The problem with the term 'ethnocultural' is that it does not really have an exact meaning. When someone searches Ethnocultural, they are redirected to ethnoreligious group instead. There are also many aspects of the culture that do match up with the culture of the rest of Bengal, and so making culture the entire differentiating factor would not be as accurate as describing Sylhetis as an ethnographic group. This latter term matches with what the lead states and the whole idea of a 'distinct but connected' identity. UserNumber (talk) 14:07, 22 April 2022 (UTC)

Thanks UserNumber, Chaipau your inputs regarding this? - Fylindfotberserk (talk) 14:20, 22 April 2022 (UTC)

It seems to me that the Sylheti is a cultural/regional identity, closely associated with the Sylheti language. Look at [1]. From 1874, this was what the Sylhetis said when attached to Assam: "[t]he cultural identity and historical association that Sylhet had with Bengal and the disadvantages of Sylhet’s being yoked with a ‘backward’ region." This is another opinion, from Anuradha Chanda: "Sylheti culture, in spite of being part of the larger Bengali one, created space for emergence of a swatantra sanskritik swatta (independent cultural soul/identity) in it". Again: "I shall shortly discuss, only asserts its Sylheti character in a cultural sense and that too contextually;"

It seems to be a cultural-linguistic identity that is historically related to the Sylhet region. It is contextual in the sense that it is defined vis-a-vis the Assamese and non-Sylheti Bengali.

Chaipau (talk) 16:44, 22 April 2022 (UTC)

@Fylindfotberserk, I made some changes in this article. It is tragic what the displaced Sylheti people have passed through, but I do not think we gain anything by false presentations, especially from the colonial and post-colonial periods. Chaipau (talk) 14:10, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

Agreed, but should we not mention Karimganj district, I mean it was part of their Sylhet region, isn't it? I mean something like ..group[3] that are associated with the Sylhet Division of Bangladesh, and the Karimganj district of Assam, India. - Fylindfotberserk (talk) 15:48, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

@Fylindfotberserk  Done Chaipau (talk) 01:52, 8 July 2023 (UTC)