Brought To Sihaladipa And Put Into Sihalabhasa For The Benefit Of The Dipavasin
By Darshanie Ratnawalli -December 22, 2013
Darshanie Ratnawalli
The author of “The Numbers Game”, probably the most informed study of the death toll for the last stages of the Elam war was telling me, that once in 2008, he was so appalled by the ignorance displayed by H L Seneviratne in anewspaper article that he immediately started digging for authoritative sources on the subjects HL was making fast and loose with and discoveredJames. W. Gair, K.R Norman and Richard Salomon[i]. When I read HL subsequently, I too was at first appalled. Then I thought what’s there to be appalled about, if the result of one man’s appalling display of ignorance was to motivate another to dig and unearth? So H.L’s was a bracing display of ignorance, and it went like this;
“In the broad perspective, one look at the ethno-demographic spread of peoples in the subcontinent makes it quite obvious that the Sinhalese are a variety of Tamils, as are other ethnic and linguistic groups of South India. It is because of the twentieth century Sinhala-Tamil rivalries that this fact is forgotten or explicitly denied. In particular, it is striking that the Sinhala Buddhists have forgotten the fact that it is in South India that Buddhism survived centuries after its disappearance from the north. It is very likely that the great Buddhist commentator Buddhaghosa was a Tamil monk, although Sinhala monastic tradition is keen to place him in North India…. And the Sinhala language, considered “Aryan”, is Tamil in its grammatical and syntactic structure, with a vocabulary of about twenty or more percent Tamil”.
To a questing person brought up in Britain in English and handicapped in Sinhalese (as the “N Game” author is) Gair was a flare that lit up the darkness that H.L Seneviratne wished to share. Let us switch on James W. Gair in “Sinhala, an Indo-Aryan Isolate”[ii] (Full text here);
Read More“Indeed, Sinhala has retained its Indo-Aryan identity despite the constant contact with Dravidian languages, a persistence that I referred to in the same paper as “a minor miracle of linguistic and cultural history” (Gair 1976b:259). It has emerged as a language with a unique character within the south Asian linguistic area, a result of its Indo-Aryan origins, Dravidian influence, and independent internal changes. There were other influences as well, some of them from the languages of successive colonizers, but it is often overlooked in this regard that there was clearly some other, apparently non-Dravidian, language (or languages) spoken on the island before the advent of Sinhala. This is shown not only by the existence of the aboriginal Veddas (whose language is now essentially a dialect of Sinhala) but also by the existence of a number of items in the Sinhala vocabulary that cannot be traced to either Indo-Aryan or Dravidian languages. (See Hettiaratchi 1959, 1974; De Silva 1979: 16). The role that some indigenous languages, or language, played in the formation of Sinhala has not really been investigated but it may well have been more than is generally recognized.”
