NO. 43—1892.] ETHNOLOGY OF CEYLON. 



271 



Pandava brothers. This very form, Pandiya, in the sense of a 

 descendant of Pandu, is mentioned, as I am informed by Professor 

 Max Miiller, by Katiyayawa, the immediate successor of Panini. 

 " History of Tinnevelly," chapter L, page 12. 



If the ladies that came from Madura were Dravidian, and if 

 Vijaya and his followers spoke Telangu, as Mr. Nell supposes, 

 the language which descended to their posterity should have 

 been Tamil or Telangu. But Mr. Nell himself concedes that 

 the Sinhalese language is a distinctive one, and that competent 

 authorities have classified it among the non-Dravidian. But 

 competent authorities, such as the Hon. James de Alwis, 

 Max Miiller, and others, who have made a study of the langu- 

 age, not only called it non-Dravidian, but have distinctly 

 pronounced the language to be Aryan. 



On reading Mr. Beames's " Comparative Grammar of the 

 Aryan Vernaculars of India" (viz., Sindhi, Hindi, Gujarati, 

 Bangali, Oria, Marati, and Panjabi), I was struck with the 

 similarity of Sinhalese to these Aryan vernaculars, and the 

 applicability of their rules to the Sinhalese language, and I 

 was induced to write a Paper on the subject in the Journal 

 of this Society in the year 1882, which was published in 

 volume VII., No. 25. The late Professor R. C. Childers, the 

 learned compiler of the Pali Dictionary, also wrote a paper on 

 the proofs of the Sanskritic origin of Sinhalese, and it was 

 published by the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and 

 Ireland in the year 1875. I have read Dr. Caldwell's 

 " Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Languages," but 

 the rules that apply to those languages I find do not apply to 

 the Sinhalese language. 



The strongest argument that is adduced by those who 

 allege that Sinhalese is a Dravidian dialect, is the want of the 

 relative construction in the Sinhalese language as in Sanskrit ; 

 that is to say, in other words, that Sinhalese is not Sanskrit. 

 Nobody says that Sinhalese is Sanskrit : what we say and 

 what, we can prove is that Sinhalese is a sister-language to 

 the Aryan vernaculars of India, a corrupt and modified 

 Prakrit ; Prakrit being the parent of all these vernaculars, 

 which was the language of the Aryans, after Sanskrit became 

 a book language. 



The cumbrous diction of the Sanskrit writers and un- 

 pronounceable words of that language have been modified in 

 the modern Aryan vernaculars, and this is not to be wondered 

 at when we consider that it took many centuries before 

 these vernaculars became what they are at the present day. 



Two hundred and thirty-seven years after the landing of 

 Vijaya and his followers, Mahindu, the son of king Asoka, 

 came to Ceylon, and wrote the Atthakathds, or commentaries 

 to the Buddhist scriptures. If the language of the inhabitants 



