Probal Dasgupta native language Bengali
Education
After returning to India his Probal had to write an admission test for one school his parents had applied to, St. Lawrence High School. The results of the test prompted the school authorities to insist that he join the Bangla stream instead of the English stream. His parents were hesitant, as schools at that time still used the archaic, Sanskritized "sadhu bhasha" instead of the colloquial Bangla for textbooks and examinations. However, Probal was able to apply the idea of conversion between codified systems that he learnt from his American fellow passenger on the ship. He coped with the puzzle of converting between the two versions of Bangla. After St. Lawrence he moved to St. Xavier's Collegiate School in 1966 and finished his schooling there in 1970.
For his higher studies Probal chose to study linguistics with Pali as a subsidiary in Kolkata's Sanskrit College. After graduating he moved to Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute (Pune, Maharashtra) for higher studies in linguistics. After a year at this Institute Probal was admitted to New York University's Graduate School of Arts and Science for a graduate programme in Linguistics. Probal joined NYU in 1975. In 1980 he completed his PhD on Questions and Relative and Complement clauses in a Bangla grammar (supervisors: Lewis Levine, Ray C. Dougherty).
mother tongue first language mother language primary language L1