THE SINHALESE LANGUAGE. 



61 



personal pronouns, I have taken the liberty to insert the Sinhalese 

 forms under the Sanskrit family to which they are allied ; and I 

 need therefore do little more here than refer the reader to his Tables, 

 given ante, p, 41. But some further examintioa into the subject 

 may not prove uninteresting. 



From the results of the valuable investigations of the same writer, 

 nan appears to be the Tamil nominative of the first person. There 

 is very little difference, if any at all, in the other Dravidian dialects 

 which also take na as the radical of this person. Now the Sinha- 

 lese has mam which may be seen as in the Persian man, the Sindhi 

 man and the Oriental Turkish men, which is the same in a variety 

 of Scythian tongues. It is found in those languages, in which ni 

 is used as the equivalent of personality in the verbal terminations. 

 This usage may also be observed in the North-Indian vernaculars, 

 as in the Sinhalese. 



The base of the Tamil pronoun ni 'thou' [second person] is the 

 same in the Malayilam, the Tuda, etc., and seem to come from the 

 pronoun of the first person. On a comparison of the several Dra- 

 vidian dialects ni, nu or na may be pronounced to have been its 

 original form. The Sinhalese ta or to has no relation whatever to 

 these bases, and on the contrary bears the nearest affinity to the 

 Sanskrit tvam, a form which pervades nearly all Indo-European 

 and the North-Indian dialects. 



From an examination of the pronouns for the first and second 

 person singular, I shall proceed to examine their forms in the 

 plural ; and here we find a peculiarity in the Sinhalese, not only 

 distinguishable from the Dravidian, but also from the Pali and the 

 Prakrits, to which lexically it bears the nearest affinity. The first 

 person forms its plural in all the Dravidian idioms by changing the 

 inflexion n into m, whilst the Prakrits adopt mhe. But the Sin- 

 halese use pi, a termination neither allied to the Dravidian, nor to 

 the Prakrit, nor indeed to the termination of pluralisation in the 

 ordinary form of the North-Indian vernaculars. There is also this 



