SINHALESE LANGUAGE. 



155 



may be readily believed that this change consisted in the dialect 

 of the conquerors, (which was probably the Prakrit) being melted 

 with the preexisting language—?*, e. by a process of shortening the 

 words of that language, and modifying it so as to suit it to the 

 tongue of men, whose organs of speech were incapable of enunciat- 

 ing several of its elements, such as the aspirates and combined 

 consonants. I shall hereafter adduce 'unequivocal proof of the 

 fact, that the Sinhala as it is known even at the present day, ex- 

 hibits the nearest affinity to the Pali and the most distant connection 

 with the Dravidian — a fact which is farther borne out by the 

 facility with which Buddhagosa of Paialiputta translated the Sin- 

 halese AltJiakatha into the Pali. It is also a fact to which I may 

 briefly allude here, that the only Sinhalese Grammar now extant 

 in this Island, follows Sanskrit and Pali, and not Dravidian writers. 



It is certainly true, as stated in the Sidatsangara,* that there 

 are three elements in the Sinhalese, one in connection with the 

 Sanskrit — another with the Pali — and the third with the local; but 

 it must be remembered that the pure Sinhalese so formed upon the 

 establishment of the Vijayan dynasty appears to have been drawnf 

 chiefly from the Sanskrit in the 15th Century after Christ, and 

 from the Malabar and Telingu after the domination of the Bekkan 

 princes, of whom the last deposed Sinhalese King, Sri Wekrama 

 Raja Sinha, spoke the Telingu well, and the Sinhalese but indif- 

 ferently. 



It was perhaps this latter phenomenon in the Sinhalese that led 

 the Rev. Dr. Stevenson to consider the Sinhalese also as a 

 branch of the Southern family.^ His own observations, however, 



* See Introduction p. xiviii. 



f See the comparative specimen of the ancient and modern Sinhalese in the 

 Sidatsangara pp, xxxvi, wherein, if one thing is clearer than another, it is that 

 nearly every word in the first is directly traceable to the Pali, and in the second 

 to the Sanscrit. 



X See Bombay Asiatic Journal for 1842 p. 195; he also places the Maldivian 

 under the head of the southern family ; but I may here remark that it is clear- 

 ly traceable to the Sinhalese, 



