CEYLON BRANCH — -ROYAL ASIATIC SOCIETY. 



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h's — that is, the gutturals and asperates. This, of course, we 

 should be disposed to ascribe to refinement, and the repose 

 proper to it ; but whatever the cause, the same change is to 

 be observed in the language of Ceylon. It is only in words 

 adopted from the restless north, words of Sanskrit or Pali 

 origin, that the asperated letters, the guttural and cerebral 

 nasals, and even the sound tsha (©) are found.. The Elu 

 grammar gives only twenty consonants, y, w, and ang, being 

 three of them, and even the modern Singhalese, though con- 

 sisting in a great measure of Sanskrit and Pali words, is 

 much less guttural and asperated, much more labial and vocal, 

 than either of these languages, or perhaps any of the other 

 languages of Asia. Were it not for the want of emphatic 

 syllables, or what comes to nearly the same thing, an equal 

 emphasis on almost every syllable, which gives it a very 

 mechanical effect, we might compare the Singhalese, in point 

 of softness, to the Italian. And indeed the Tamil, which is 

 spoken by half the inhabitants of Ceylon, seems to me, equal 

 in its ordinary strain, to the greatest efforts of which the 

 Italian is capable. Like the Italian and pure Singhalese, it 

 rejects asperated letters. It retains indeed only two, out of 

 each set of five, in the Nagari alphabet, and these, the two 

 which are most sonorous, infusing energy by the abundant 

 use of r, set off by no fewer than three sounds of 1, the other 

 lingual, On this subject, in reference to the Singhalese, the 

 acute Callaway, in the Singhalese Grammar prefixed to his 

 Dictionary, makes the following remarks. " Some writers 

 seem to fancy that their compositions are destitute of dignity 

 and grace, without a proportion of asperated consonants. 

 Letters of that class are disused in speaking, and as their 

 sound differs in nothing from that of their unasperated com- 

 panions, but in a stronger breathing, it may be considered 

 pedantic to use them at all. When words abounding with 

 consonants are received into Singhalese, from other languages. 



