THE SINHALESE LANGUAGE. 



25 



these is hansa % The very English words ' duck ' and * goose ' come 

 from the Vedic hak-gusa=hansa . 



vii. The Tamil kaludei 1 ass,' which is evidently allied to the 

 Sanskrit khara, has produced our Sinhalese kaludcevd. But the 

 original Sinhalese word kota-lu is independent of the Tamil. 



viii. The Sinhalese word for 4 bird ' is paksi ; but in colloquial 

 usage we meet with kurulu, so near the Tamil kuruvi. It is not a 

 generic term for bird, but a word for a species of small birds. 

 See my Contributions io Oriental Literature, i. p. 44. 



ix. There is some resemblance between the Sinhalese Mttu and 

 the Tamil kiita, 'near.' In the Sanskrit, Pali, and some of the 

 Korth-Indian vernaculars the word for 4 near ' is nika.lu* This 

 Word the Sinhalese have adopted for the 1 chin,' and have therefore 

 altered the same word into kittu to denote ' nearness.' It may be 

 thence inferred that both the Tamil and the Sinhalese words are 

 derived from the Sanskrit. 



Thus, in three out of the above nine words, the lexical analogies 

 disappear on a little examination; and we have only six out of 

 sixty-four words, or less than one-tenth of the words in the above 

 list, which are related to the Dravidian. Yet, it is very remarkable 

 that those six words are not what we find in the books, but what 

 may be termed a secondary formation confined to the colloquial 

 speech of the Sinhalese. It would thence appear that, if we dispense 

 with all the Sinhalese words which we may trace to a Dravidian 

 origin, we may still express ourselves on all matters with the aid 

 of other Sinhalese words which are undoubtedly of Sanskrit origin ; 

 or, in other words, that the Sinhalese may flourish without the aid 

 of the Dravidian. 



Though generally, as I have already remarked, the terminology 

 of our classical authors is free from the Dravidian ; yet, it is of some 

 historical interest to notice here an exception. It is the Sinhalese 

 version of the Pansiapanas Jatake, in which we find such words 

 as the following, and which it is impossible to understand now-a- 

 days but for the Pali work of which it is a translation; kollu and 



E 



