A Language Called Sinhala Through A Glass Darkly
Darshanie Ratnawalli
“May you live in interesting times”- An obscure Chinese curse.
What makes certain social sciences scholars of Sri Lanka interesting is a strange fallibility in acquiring the basic text book information on subjects they write about. Even a cursory trawl through academic writings falling under Sri Lankan studies will flush out scholars, some of them quite high profile, who have left for posterity, evidence of this fallibility. Ranjini Obeyesekere, a medievalist scholar in Sinhalese literature wrote (A Survey of The Sinhala Literary tradition[i], 1979); “It can be claimed that the introduction of Buddhism to Sri Lanka in the third century, B.C., resulted in the creation of the Sinhala language, literature, and nation.” What causes such sentences to be written is the erroneous belief that in the third century BC, missionary monks from the Mauryan Court arriving in Lanka in shiploads, brought with them a language which they taught to the inhabitants in order to enable them to use the new language to dedicate caves to the newly established monastic Buddhist Order; and that it was this new missionary language, which eventually spread to the masses and evolved into the present Sinhala language. What could have helped Ranjini Obeyesekere to avoid such an error is the information that by the time Buddhism was introduced to Sri Lanka, the Sinhala language had already undergone several centuries of ‘creation’ within the shores of Lanka and the ‘creators’ were the pre-Buddhist teeth, palettes and the tongues of the island population. The easiest way to acquire this information would have been through a tete-a-tete with a friendly linguist or a competent ancient period historian. A more hard-working way would have been to plod through texts.
Around 1960, specialist in the making, Saddhamangala Karunaratne made a certain remark in his Ph.D. dissertation[ii] approved by the University of Cambridge that may have caused R. Obeyesekere to imagine a fusion between the language of the Buddhist missionaries and the language of the 3rd century BC Lankans out of which(according to her conceptualization) emerged the Sinhala language. The remark was; “The earliest inscriptions of Ceylon are short records containing stereotyped phrases of the Buddhist monks. The language of these records may well reflect, for some time at least, the language of the Buddhist missionaries, and not the original Sinhalese.” Read More
