THE SINHALESE LANGUAGE. 



73 



nemiy being simply an introduction of an n to the personal termi- 

 nation of the present tense. 



Participles — On examination, I find a peculiarity which 

 distinguishes the Sinhalese from the Dravidian Participle, viz., that 

 the latter is destitute of what the former, in common with all the 

 North-Indian and Indo-European dialects, possesses, the verbal par* 

 ticiple, which participates in the nature of adjectives.* 



I may here notice another analogy in the formation of the par- 

 ticiple to which Dr. Stevenson refers. He says that in the Sinhalese, 

 Telugu, Carnatika, and Tamil. .....the present participle active re- 

 ceives the signs of the persons as affixes, to form the present indi- 

 cative. 'In the Northern family generally (he adds), I believe, as in 

 the Hindi, and with a negative in Gujarathi, the present tense is 

 formed by the participle and the substantive verb as in our form, 

 / am reading. 7 



The gign of the Sinhalese present participle has indeed, appa« 

 rently, a distant resemblance to the sign of the first person; but I 

 feel persuaded that its formation is totally unconnected with the 

 principle upon which the verbal termination in the first person of 

 the indicative mood is formed. In the latter, the first person takes, 

 as in several other languages, the pronoun for the first person, 

 which is m in the Sinhalese; but the participle takes min, which is 

 the Sanskrit and the Pali mdna in the same part of speech, e. 

 Gachchamawaw, Pali and Sanskrit (neuter) ' going'; and this again 

 is more like the termination in the English 4 sing-iw^,' or the Scotch 

 'sing-tra.' 



The Infinitive — Dr. Stevenson says that in the languages, whose 

 agreement in grammatical forms he has noticed, the infinitive 

 adopts the sign of the dative. So far as appearances go this 

 is quite correct. If any inference can be drawn from this resem- 

 blance, it will be observed that the same inference may also be 

 drawn as between all these dialects, and the English. See ante p. 57. 



* Caldwell's Dravidian Grammar, p. 384, 



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