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JOURNAL, R.A.S. (CEYLON). [VOL. XII. 



of Ceylon was Telangu or Tamil, lie should have written 

 them in one of those languages. But they were written in 

 Sinhalese. 



The rock inscriptions of Ceylon should not be forgotten in an 

 inquiry of this kind ; some of them, according to Dr. E. Miiller, 

 are of the first century B.C. The characters are the old 

 Nagari or Lat, and the language is a kind of Prakrit allied to 

 Pali. Now there can be no doubt that these inscriptions were 

 intended to be read and understood by the people, and 

 hence, too, it might fairly be concluded that the people who 

 inhabited the country were an Aryan race ; and it is curious 

 to find how the language and characters of these inscriptions 

 gradually changed as time passed on, and how in the inscrip- 

 tions between the fifth and ninth centuries the language 

 becomes somewhat intelligible to the scholars of the present 

 day, and the characters to some extent assume the present forms 

 of the Sinhalese alphabet. Even then the ordinary scholar, 

 who is not acquainted with the old Lat characters, is not 

 able to read them, owing to the occurrence of these latter 

 characters in them. 



I have to refer to plate No. 121 A, of " Ancient Inscriptions 

 in Ceylon," by Dr. Miiller. These inscriptions when 

 carefully examined will show that the Sinhalese characters 

 of the present day were gradually evolved from the old 

 Nagari or Lat characters, and not borrowed from Malayalam, 

 Canarese, or Telangu, the similarity between these latter 

 and the Sinhalese characters being that they are round. To the 

 iron style and the ola in which the Sinhalese write their books 

 is greatly due the present form of the Sinhalese characters. 



Before concluding this Paper I beg to draw your 

 attention to another passage in Mr, Childers' contribution 

 referred to, about the word Elu, which was said by Mr. 

 Tissanayagam to be derived from the Tamil Ilam. It 

 is opposed to the rules of philology to derive one word from 

 another, merely because the sound is similar. The deriva- 

 tion must be accounted for step by step by the well-known 

 laws called phonetic rules. " Strange as it may appear," says 

 Mr. Childers, "the word Elu is no other than Sinhalese 

 much corrupted. It stands for an older form Hela or 

 Helu, which occurs in some ancient works, and this again 

 for a still older Sela, which brings us back to the Pali 

 form Sihala, For the loss of the medial syllable he com- 

 pare the Sinhalese dola, representing the Pali dohala and 

 Sanskrit douhrida, and for the loss of the initial s compare 

 ira = surya and urd = sukara." I may add that as to the 

 change of i into e, compare Sinhalese velep for the Sanskrit 

 vitapa, " tuft" or " top branch" ; Sinhalese vehera for 

 the Sanskrit vihare, a building in which Buddha's image is 



