Art. III.— Notes on the Sinhalese Language No. 1.— on The

35 ART. III.—Notes on the Sinhalese Language. No. 1.—On the Formation of the Plural of Neuter Nouns. By R. C. CHILDERS, late of the Ceylon Civil Service. THE Sinhalese is one of the Aryan vernaculars of India, and is spoken by the descendants of a people who migrated from Magadha to Ceylon at a very remote period. The tradition recorded in Mahavansa is that Ceylon was colonised, by a prince of Lala, a district of Magadha, who landed in the island with seven hundred followers on the day of Gautama Buddha's death. Accepting this tradition, and comparing it with the tradition that Pali was a Magadha dialect, we should expect to find a close resemblance between Pali and Sinhalese. And such in fact is the case. With a few exceptions, Sinhalese follows Pali so closely that at first sight one might feel inclined to say that the former was derived from the latter. As a general rule, where Pali differs from the other Prakrits, the Sinhalese agrees with it; and this is the case not only with words but with grammatical forms.1 And there are several words not found in the other Prakrits or Sanskrit which are found in both Pali and Sinhalese. I have alluded to exceptions, and these deserve full consideration; but they are such as may be explained by the circumstance, to which the Buddhist traditions clearly point, that the language of Buddha's sermons was the dialect of one district of Magadha, and the language spoken by the colonisers of Ceylon that of another district. As an instance of these exceptions, I may mention the Sinhalese iliri " woman," which clearly cannot have come to us through the Pali itthi, since the latter has lost the original r of the Sanskrit 1 A typical instance of this agreement is found in the Sinhalese dak-inava " to see," and the Pali dakkhati, both of which retain the a of their Sanskrit original drakshyati, while the other Prakrits have altered it to e. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. INSEAD, on 15 May 2018 at 04:58:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0035869X0001635X 36 NOTES ON THE SINHALESE LANGUAGE. No. 1. Besides the vernacular Sinhalese spoken in Ceylon in the present day, there is also the ancient language called Elu, from which the present vernacular is immediately derived, and to which it bears something of the same sort of relation that the English of to-day bears to Anglo-Saxon. Funda- mentally Elu and Sinhalese are identical, and the difference of form which they present is due partly to the large number of new grammatical forms evolved by the modern language, and partly to an immense influx into it of Sanskrit nouns, borrowed, often without alteration, at a comparatively recent period. It must be observed, however, that these "tatsamas" are very rare in the colloquial speech of the lower classes, their true home being the more pretentious class of literary compositions, and the highflown language of cere- mony and official < intercourse. For verse compositions the ancient language is still exclusively employed, and con- temporary Sinhalese poetry is unintelligible to those who have not made Elu their special study. Strange as it may appear, the word Elu is no other than Sinhala much corrupted.1 It stands for an older form Hela or Helu, which occurs in some ancient works, and this again, for a still older Sela, which brings us back to the Pali form Sihala. For the loss of the medial syllable ha compare the Sinhalese dola, representing the Pali dohala and Sanskrit ^T|^, and for the loss of the initial s compare «Va=^^ and MrM=^feB^. Sinhala is the name by which the Sinhalese call themselves, but curiously enough the word is itself not Sinhalese but Sanskrit. It was borrowed from Sanskrit literature many centuries ago, and gradually took the place of the unpretending dissyllable Elu. Among the uneducated classes its pronunciation has degenerated to Hingala. The English transliteration of the word Sinhala has gone through several phases. First of all we called the inhabi- tants of Ceylon " Cingalese," and for a long series of years this spelling reigned unquestioned. But about fifteen years ago an uneasy impression began to prevail that the old- fashioned transcription was hardly equal to the requirements 1 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core See D'Alwis's Sidath. INSEAD Sangarawa, on 15 May, 2018p. at 04:58:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0035869X0001635X ON THE FORMATION OP THE PLURAL OF NEUTER NOUNS. 37 of modern philology, and a new and more scientific spelling, "Singhalese," gradually crept in, and was fixed and popu- larised by its adoption in Emerson Tennent's work. The substitution of s for o was a great advance, and the existence of the aspirate was no longer ignored; but the obnoxious g was still retained, the idea being that the anusvara, or nasal «, could only be represented by the combination ng. At length, about six or seven years ago, the Ceylon Government, following the wise example of the Indian Government, adopted and enforced a uniform and scientific system of transliteration of native names, and the g was finally got rid of.1 The Sinhalese language, when compared with Sanskrit, presents a remarkable picture of phonetic decay. Nearly all conjunct consonants have disappeared,, a group being either represented by only one of the consonants which composed it, or broken up into two syllables. The letter ^ is lost, and is generally replaced by s, and the letter ^ is generally replaced by d. Initial h is usually dropped, and initial s very frequently passes into h, or is dropped altogether. In a great number of instances a hard consonant between two vowels is softened to y or v, as when rntf becomes pavu, ^ffa l&va, ^TPT nay a, and so on. The aspirated consonants are lost, being mostly replaced by the .corresponding un- aspirated consonant, but occasionally broken up by a vowel, as in daham from dharma. Whole syllables have been elimi- nated, sometimes from the beginning or end, sometimes from the middle of a word. Long vowels are generally shortened, and a number of complicated and fantastic vowel changes 1 On the analogy of the word " Sanskrit," we ought to write " Sinhalese," the sound represented by the » being in each case the same (anusvara). Strictly speaking, anusvara shouldie represented by m or m, but it would be pedantry to- write "Samskrit" with the diacritical marks, because the word is thoroughly- Anglicised ; and the same may be said of the word Sinhalese. It is a matter of abiding regret to me that I was the means of introducing into Ceylon an n with a circle under it to represent anusv&ra. In 1863 I read a paper before the Ceylon Asiatic Society, " On the Romanisation of the Sinhalese Alphabet," and, to carry out my (somewhat crude) views, imported to Ceylon a set of types with diacritical marks made to my order in England. When I left Ceylon soon afterwards, the Government took over my types, which included the unsightly n, and made use of them, I believe, for their official system of transliteration. Hence my sense of the fitness of things is occasionally offended by the sight of the word DownloadedSinhales from ehttps://www.cambridge.org/core written Sinhalese, a practic.e INSEAD agains, ton whic 15 Mayh I 2018here atente 04:58:09r my , protestsubject .to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0035869X0001635X 38 NOTES ON THE SINHALESE LANGUAGE. No. 1. have taken place, which, in several instances have been ex- tended and utilised so as to express grammatical relations. The Sinhalese language can boast of a very high antiquity. I have already said that the Elu of literature differs in no essential respect from the modern language, and Eld books have come down to us from the fifth and sixth centuries after Christ. But Elu inscriptions have been found on the rocks at Mahintale dating from the second and third centuries, and we may yet hope to find others of even older date. Nor is this all. We know from Mahavansa, that so early as the beginning of the third century before Christ Mahinda translated the Buddhist Arthakathas from Pali into Sinhalese, and hence there must have been even at that remote period a Sinhalese language distinct from Pali. This fact gives rise to a very interesting question. Assuming that the colonisers of Ceylon in the middle of the fifth century B.C. spoke Pali, or a dialect closely akin to it, how is it that Mahinda, less than two hundred and fifty years afterwards, found the language of Ceylon so different from Pali that he thought it worth while to translate the Arthakathas into it ? I am inclined to base my explanation of this phenomenon on the well-known fact that the rate of phonetic decay in a language varies in a remarkable manner according to the circumstances, social, political, and literary, of the people who speak it. I believe that the secret of the astonishingly rapid decay of the language spoken by Vijaya and his immigrants is to be found in their isolation, in their being cut off from their Indian brethren, and withdrawn from the influences of literature and ancestral institutions.

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