Sinhala language

“ Provided that a person may be required to have a sufficient knowledge of Sinhala or Tamil, as a condition for admission to any such service or public institution where no function of the office or employment for which he is recruited can bc discharged otherwise than with a sufficient knowledge of such language. ”

“ Sri Lanka is an ethnically, linguistically and religiously diverse country of 21 million people, of which 74 per cent are Sinhalese, speak Sinhala and are overwhelmingly Buddhist; 18 per cent are Tamil, speak Tamil and are mostly Hindu (comprised of Sri Lankan Tamils and Indian Tamils, 13 per cent and 5 per cent respectively) ; 7 per cent are Muslim, comprised of Moors and Malays who practice Islam and are largely Tamil-speaking; and 1 per cent belong to small ethnic communities including the Burghers and Veddahs, among others. [1] Christians account for a small percentage of some communities. ”

“ I have mentioned before, that according to the Dravidian traditions, all the dominant tribes of S. India migrated from Northern provinces to Peninsular India. It is a distinct and a definite characteristic of essential nature, in the Tamil language, that an initial of a word can never be formed of double consonants, and compound letters formed of consonants different Varga can occur nowhere in a word. If we refer the changes under consideration to the essential peculiarities of the Tamil speech, our problem will be solved. ”

“ I have also said how words of foreign origin may simulate the appearance of Aryan words, and how by comparing the roots and idioms of different languages we have to determine the real character of the words. Some additional examples are adduced here to make the matter convincing. কটু, কুটি, or কুটীর, কুটুম্ব, and খট্টা, are words without roots in the Sanskrit language, while they are found well-rooted in the Tamil speech and they are there in the company of many words derived from their living roots. ”

“ The reason why the term became thus specifically applied to the Telugu people is probably because, when the Portuguese arrived, the Telugu monarchy of Vijayanagara, or Bijanagar (see BISNAGAR, NARSINGA) was dominant over great part of the Peninsula. The officials were chiefly of Telugu race, and thus the people of this race, as the most important section of the Hindūs, were par excellence the Gentiles, and their language the Gentile language. ”

“ According to the census of 1881, the number of Tamil-speaking people throughout the province was 12,413,517, inclusive of 21,992 Yerkalas, 3843 Kurumbas, and 287 Irulas, three tribes speaking rude dialects of the language. To these should be added about 160,000 in the French possessions. But, as of all the Dravidian languages the Tamil shows the greatest tendency to spread, its area becomes ever larger, encroaching on that of the contiguous languages. ”

“ In India there are tribes Aryan by language, but whose physique is rather of indigenous type, and whose ancestry is mainly from indigenous stocks with more or less mixture of the dominant Hindu. Some tribes coming under this category, as among the Bhils and Kulis of the 50Bombay Presidency, speak dialects which are Hindi in vocabulary at least, whether or not in grammatical structure, and yet the people themselves are lower in culture than some Hinduized nations who have retained their original Dravidian speech, the Tamils for instance. ”

“ No doubt, speaking generally, the vernacular languages of India are not worth studying for the sake of their literature; but if in this respect one vernacular is worthy of study more than another, it is certainly the Bengali language.
Many people in England regard the natives of India much in the same light as they regard the natives of Africa. A perusal of the following tale will at least give them some conception of the stage of civilization at which the Bengali race has arrived, and of the intellectual attainments of the educated classes. ”

“ It is a striking phenomenon that there are some linguistic peculiarities, wherein Oriya agrees with Assamese, and differs from Bengali. This phenomenon can only be explained by this, that Bengal as a progressive country has altered the early forms, while the archaic forms have been retained in Orissa and Assam. We can safely hold, that the Māgadhi language, as was once fashioned and modified on the soil of Bengal, got into Assam to take a fresh root there to develop into a new language under the influence of a language altogether foreign to the Aryan speech. ”

“ As the Tamil immigrants came into Southern India at distant intervals of time and in separate tribes, and were fewer in number than the aboriginal Nagas and Dravidians, they had to adopt the ancient Dravidian language, and in course of time, they modified and refined it into the language now known as Tamil. ”

“ The present article deals with Tamil in its restricted sense only.
The Tamils, taken as the type and representatives of the Dravidian race, do not now, owing to early intermixture with the Aryan immigrants, materially differ in physical character from the other curly-haired indigenous population of India. They were at one time, on the ground of the general structure of their language, classed with the Mongoloid (Turanian, Scythian) and even the Australian races, but that classification is rejected by all the leading ethnologists. ”

“ It must be noticed that the words borrowed from other languages have all to conform to the genius of the languages into which they are adopted. This is what takes place in the Bengali language and this is what as a matter of course takes place in Hindi even though the speakers, through whose agency the adoption is accomplished, are Muhammadans. [2] That an adherence to an unscientific situation has a mischievous effect on education must be duly appreciated. ”

“ In such a use as আমা হতে হেন কার্য্য না হবে সাধন, the word হতে signifies certainly instrumentality, but its ablative sense is also noticeable in the use; the action 'flowing out of me' can be construed to be the underlying idea.
Dative.—In Assamese we get 'লৈ' as a special dative case-ending, while in Bengali and Oriya, we have the same 'কু' or 'ক' or 'কে'-suffix both for accusative and dative. This 'লৈ,' noticeable also in Nepalese and in a Behari dialect, is the reduced form of 'লাগি,' in use in Bengali as well as in Oriya; তোমার লাগি (for you) is rather a poetic use in Bengali. ”

“ A familiarity with the spoken Telugu as already alluded to, gives so little aid in reading the superior language used in poems, that some have hence imagined the latter to be obsolete: just as the Telugus, Canarese or Tamils, however fluent in colloquial English, are unable to read English poems; which we look upon as perfectly easy. And yet their poets are read with delight by persons of ordinary education: a fact which led me to the conclusion that the “high or Sanscrit dialect” was neither obsolete nor in general pedantic. ”

“ The term for river would seem to be only a dialectic variation of the Tamil நதி nathi, (vulgó nuddee, and nullah) a word which, coming from the Sanscrit, is found in all Hindu languages. The words for tank, stone, man, seem to come from the Hindustani, or possibly from the Udiya language of the province of Orissa. The word for mother is a slight variation from a Tamil word of like meaning, though now not much used. Abba, for father is found in Hebrew, Syriac, Telugu, Tamil, and in some of the dialects of the islands in the eastern archipelago ”

“ The literary dialect is very difficult to master. That is the reason why Telugus who have received the best Western culture are unable to cultivate composition in Telugu. They are afraid or committing blunders, and give up the attempt in despair. Spontaneous writing is out of the question, when one has to write a language which he has to learn from books and is in mortal dread of violating grammar or usage at every step. ”

“ Uniformity is no virtue unless it is accompanied by ease in acquisition. Sanskrit is uniform in the whole of India, but like literary Telugu it has to be acquired with great effort. The vernacular on the other hand, is acquired naturally.
214. Mr. J. Ramayya Pantulu opines that if Modern Telugu is cultivated, it will acquire fixity and deviate from speech. He quotes Lounsbury to show that the changes in English during the last five hundred years were ‘insignificant’. Why should then the language of a conversative oriental people like the Telugus change more? ”

“ Mæso-Gothic, under Mœ.
Mag-Reading.
American: Indians of California. See Schoolcraft’s “Indian Tribes,” vol. iv. It is allied to Copeh.
Magadhi.
Indic: corrupt Bengali, some say derived from Prakrit, spoken in the province of Bahar, S. of the Ganges. It is rather the old Pali dialect of S. India.
Magar.
Dialect of Nipal, spoken by a military tribe; has Thibetan affinities with admixture of Hindi. Vocaby. in Hunter’s “Comp. Dicty.” A. C.
Magindanao.
Malayan: language of the Philippines, closely allied to Bissayan, and spoken in several dialects. ”

“ The central mountainous region and the table-lands of the Dekhan yet belong to the aboriginal tribes, who in the north were crowded out or subjugated, at a period lying only just beyond the ken of recorded history, by the Indo-European races, as they intruded themselves through the avenue, the passes on the north-western frontier, by which the conquerors of India have in all ages found entrance. The principal modern dialects of our kindred are the Hindi, Bengali, and Mahratta, each with various subdivisions, and each with a literature of its own, running back only a few centuries. ”

“ In fact, the aboriginal language, before it felt the animating spirit of the Aryan tongue, must have been a barren one, the language of a primitive man, a fisherman, a hunter, a careless tiller of the soil. As Maxwell says in his Manual of the Malay Language, the Sanskrit word hala (plow) marks a revolution in Malayan agriculture and, one may say further, Malayan civilization. What changed the methods of cultivating the soil, changed the people themselves. ”

“ How one is liable to mistake one old language for another allied speech, may even be illustrated by an example of a sentence composed in a modern language. The line of our poet Rabindranath which reads, হে আদি জননী সিন্ধু, বসুন্ধরা সন্তান তোমার, can be easily pronounced as Assamese if the Bengali metre is disregarded; Aryan Vernaculars other than Assamese can also very well claim the line to be theirs, but for the grammatical form তোমার, which occurs at the end of the line. ”

“ The home more than the school, should be the nursery of the mother tongue. The government will take the necessary steps for the development and propagation of the Tagalog language as ordained in the Constitution not only through the medium of the Institute of National Language and the encouragement of vernacular literature, but also by making its study compulsory in all schools and eventually prescribing its use in official correspondence, as well as in public ceremonies. ”

“ What I want to bring out prominently is that, we cannot study the phonetic changes in a speech without taking the speakers of it into account. After observing the differences among the sister dialects, we raise the question, why the parent tongue underwent different sorts of changes in different provinces, we ask why the "apabhramśa" forms in use in Hindi for example, did not become current in Bengali? What were the solvent elements in different provinces that brought about the characteristic changes noticeable in different speeches of common origin? ”

“ It will be necessary, therefore, to refer to the accent systems of our neighbouring tribes to solve some points of difficulty. In ignorance of the fact that some non-Aryan speeches exercised some influence upon Bengali, and misled by the description of our language as Sanskritic, many capable scholars have devoted themselves of late to the ingenious but wasteful work of digging out Sanskrit roots and stems for such Bengali words and inflections as are entirely of other origin. ”

“ Dr Pope, however, believed Tamil to be a corruption of tenmoli, southern speech, in contradistinction to vaḍugu, the northern, i.e., Telugu language. As in the case of the Kafir, Turkish, Tagala and other typical languages, the term Tamulic or Tamulian has occasionally been employed as the designation of the whole class of Dravidian peoples and languages, of which it is only the most prominent member. The present article deals with Tamil in its restricted sense only. The Tamils proper are smaller and of weaker build than Europeans, though graceful in shape. ”

“ The language spoken in those places, the Hindi, thus became rich in Tadbhavas. In the remote marshes of Bengal and the isolated coast-line of Orissa the Aryan pulse beat but feebly. Life was ruder and less civilized, and non-Aryan tribes mustered in great force in the plains as well as in the hills. The extremities lagged behind the heart, words which had a meaning in the courts and cities of Northern and Western India were not known to or required by the nearly naked Bengali crouching in his reed hut in those outlying regions. ”

“ The Aryan languages are spoken in the plains by almost the whole population; the Munda and Dravidian in the Chota Nagpur plateau and adjoining tracts; and the Tibeto-Burman in Darjeeling, Sikkim and Jalpaiguri. The most important Aryan languages are Bengali (q.v.) , Bihari, Eastern Hindi and Oriya. On the average in the province, before partition, out of every 1000 persons 528 spoke Bengali, 341 Hindi and Bihari, and 79 Oriya. As a rule Bengali is the language of Bengal proper, Hindi of Behar and Chota Nagpur, and Oriya of Orissa. ”

“ Instances of like nature, where Mahammadan Emperors and Chiefs initiated and patronised translations of Sanskrit and Persian works into Bengali, are numerous, and we are led to believe, that when the powerful Moslem Sovereigns of Bengal granted this recognition to the Vernacular language in their courts, Hindu Rājās naturally followed suit. The Brahmins could not resist the influence of this high patronage; they were therefore compelled to favour the language they had hated so much, and latterly they themselves came forward to write poems and compile works of translation in Bengali. ”