Sinhala is a distinct language that evolved in Sri Lanka, but shares an ancient root script with Tamil

Author: Rover - mworth8@gmail.com

Sinhala is a distinct language that evolved in-situ in Sri Lanka, and Tamil language evolved in India, but still, Sri Lankan Tamil is distinguishable from Indian Tamil. Sinhala has a more unique word repertoire than Sri Lankan Tamil, when compared to any other language in the world. In other words, almost no Sinhala will be identified by any Indian (or any other race), whereas most of Sri Lankan Tamil would be understood by at least 65 million Indians. Here the mechanisms that may have been important in the evolution and development these two languages are considered.

The roots of Sinhala is Indo-Germanic (Aryan) in origin but is very distinct from its Indian mother language. The reason for this is probably allopatry (evolving in isolation), which is an important mechanism in the evolution of new languages (as much as the evolution of new species). To gather a fairly substantial repertoire of unique words that the Sinhala language has, Sinhala must have evolved in isolation for over a long period of time in Sri Lanka. It may have both retained some ancestral words that have now gone extinct in its mother language, and also would have evolved unique words. Given the fact that there are so many disparate languages in the Indo-Aryan group of languages even within India were strict isolation is not possible, it is not surprising that Sinhala quickly evolved to be a unique language in isolation.

The most parsimonious explanation to the origin and evolution of Tamil would have been in India, as it has the greater population (that use Tamil) in India and the roots to other Indian languages (like Kannada and Malayalam) is quite distinct. There are only a fewer unique words peculiar to 'Sri Lankan Tamil' when compared to Indian Tamil; but a little bit more so with other south Indian Dravidian languages; and the Sri Lankan Tamil grammar is also slightly different from that of Indian Tamil. This too would have happened due to the isolation of Sri Lankan Tamil language, but to a lesser degree, when compared to Sinhala.

It is hard to imagine a scenario where Sinhala evolving in India and then, the whole population migrating over to Sri Lanka (without leaving many traces of this language in India); or that after part of this hypothetical population moved over to Sri Lanka, the ancestral population going extinct in India (I don't think in India languages would readily go extinct, evidenced by the number of languages that persists together). However the languages that persist today in India are closely interrelated to each other, and hence the roots of these languages are embedded very much in India. These alternative explanations are less parsimonious than the one mentioned above.

Hence Sinhala must have evolved in isolation over a longer period of time (it would be hard to determine how fast a language evolves as many complex factors are involved), when compared to Sr Lankan Tamil.

However, Tamil people have also lived in Sri Lanka for over a very long period of time, and they also have some words that are not used by Indian Tamils. For example, names with a –koon ending (like Gnanakoon) are not known from India. However, these names have even filtered into Sinhala names (like Tennakoon ect.). The grammar of Sri Lankan Tamil people is also distinct from that of Indian Tamils. This shows that isolation of the Sri Lankan Tamils from India have given rise to this.

All the natural languages in the world are closed systems, this means that you don’t need to go outside the rules of grammar of a given language to find explanations for meaningful statements that it can make. Grammar, in a given language, is a system in which words are put together to express something meaningful; contrary to popular belief, however in natural languages, grammar evolves a long time before writing, and most of the rules of grammar are based on speech/sound, rather than writing.

If grammar is based on sound/speech, can all of these languages use a single script to write in that language?! Yes in theory it can (we can write a Tamil sentence that is sounded out, using Sinhala letters right?), but the script must be flexible enough to write all these sounds effectively. Ancient Brahmi script was used to write in many languages, it was the root script for most of contemporary scripts in the Asian region, including surprisingly even perhaps Korean (Brahmi script also is the basis for the alphabetical order for Japanese Kana). However, some of the sounds, for example that you find in Sanskrit, cannot be written using Brahmi script, so another slightly different system developed, which is called Prakrit (but even for Prakrit, the roots are in Brahmi script). However, I should mention, despite this short coming, that early Sanskrit has also been written in Brahmi script.

It is pertinent to talk a little bit about King Asoka and his inscriptions, as he greatly influenced the establishment of Buddhist culture in Sri Lanka. Asoka’s inscriptions were written in Prakrit, to be precise, Magadhi Prakrit. Some think that Pali (the language of Theravada Buddhism) and Maghadi Prakrit are the same. And when Mahinda Thero, Asoka’s son who introduced Buddha Dharma to Sri Lanka during the reign of King Devanampiyatissa, he also introduced Pali to Sri Lanka. Though Pali was not significantly absorbed into Sinhala, the Sinhalese lay people maintain the Pali language as a religious oral tradition in the form of Buddhist gathas and sutras, and currently write and perpetuate these in Sinhala script.

The earliest inscriptions in Sri Lanka, before the evolution of the Sinhala script, are in Brahmi script; and both Sinhala and Tamil scripts evolved from this. Sinhala adopted a more circular style (some argue that this style was easier to be written on Palm leaves -Thalpath- without damaging them) the origin of this again occurred in Sri Lanka and Tamil script evolved into a more angular style, and the origin was in Southern India. (At a time when we are only talking about differences, I thought I should highlight what we share).

According to William Geiger, some of the unique sounds that are not seen in Indo-Aryan or Dravidian languages arose in Sinhala during the 6th century AD. And these sounds were accommodated in its script, which had at this point evolved very close to its present form. Sri Lankan Tamil people, possibly very recently, perhaps due to the influence of mass media, have slightly adopted these sounds, but most still cannot pronounce these sounds. However, it is not present in their written grammar, as Tamil script cannot accommodate these sounds. So again we see a recent attempt by Sri Lankan Tamil people to adopt these Sinhala sounds, even when their script does not really allow it.

Considering that language is one of the causes for the ethnic tension between the two groups, it is high time that both ethnicities in Sri Lanka work together, enjoying the common origins that we share, appreciating things that we don’t share, and respecting the attempts at integration of some of the unique features of these languages. This is the best way to prevent terrorist groups like the LTTE that play to the lower instincts of people from gaining a foot hold in our Sri Lankan society.

This is a rewrite of one of my brief notes that appeared here. The bloggers Wijayapala, ReallyCold and Swarnajith Udana are acknowledged for highlighting a couple of issues that needed to be clarified.