234 



JOUENAL B. A. S. (CEYLON). [Vol. VlL, Pt. III. 



THE CONNECTION OF THE SINHALESE WITH THE 

 MODERN ARYAN VERNACULARS OF INDIA. 



By W. P. Ranasinha, Esq. 



Is Sinhalese to be placed under the Turanian family of 

 languages with Tamil, Telugu, &c, or under the Indo- Germanic 

 family, along with Hindi, Bengali, Panjabi, Sindhi, Marathi, 

 Gujarathi, Nepali, Oriya, Assamese, and Kashmiri ? 



The Turanian family of languages has not got beyond the 

 collocational or syntactical and agglutinated stages, whilst 

 the Sinhalese has not only reached the inflectional stage, like 

 Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, but has also advanced to the ana- 

 lytical, like the English, French, &c. : examples are 253d£^, 

 karayi, "he does" ; ca&,yayi, "he goes" ; <5^S, deyi, "he gives," &c. 

 Here we find the stems z» 6, kara, CO, ya, and G^, de, which are 

 derived from the Sanskrit roots 25)a, kri, coo, yd, and dd, with 

 an inflection S, yi. This S, yi, is again divisible into two parts 

 Co, y, and i. The 0$, y, is merely an augment adopted for the 

 purpose of avoiding the hiatus which would otherwise occur if 

 after the stem the i, were pronounced alone. The §>, i, here 

 is the remnant of ti, in the Sanskrit verbs 253@>db^, karoti^ 

 "he does"; SD<5*8, bharati, "he bears," &c. Mr. Beames points out 

 that ti 9 is equal to the English s in "he bears, &c." In Greek 

 4>epei, he says, we have i equal to the English pronoun "he." In 

 Latin fert the i is lost and t alone remains. In Gothic baireth we 

 have th ; here too the i is lost. In English "beareth" the i is lost, 

 and the th alone remains. The English th and the Sinhalese i 

 are parts of the same termination ti. This th in English, 

 he points out, is still further modified in the modern language into 

 s as in "bears," "fears," &c. So the English s and the Sinhalese 

 i, in the third person singular number present tense of the 

 indicative mood, can be traced to the Aryan ti, — the English 

 taking the first part of the termination and further modifying 



