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Art. III.—Notes on the Sinhalese Language No. 1.— On the Formation of the Plural of Neuter Nouns
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2011
Extract
The Sinhalese is one of the Aryan vernaculars of India, and is spoken by the descendants of a people who migrated from Magadha to Ceylon at a very remote period. The tradition recorded in Mahavansa is that Ceylon was colonised, by a prince of Lala, a district of Magadha, who landed in the island with seven hundred followers on the day of Gautama Buddha's death. Accepting this tradition, and comparing it with the tradition that Pali was a Magadha dialect, we should expect to find a close resemblance between Pali and Sinhalese. And such in fact is the case. With a few exceptions, Sinhalese follows Pali so closely that at first sight one might feel inclined to say that the former was derived from the latter. As a general rule, where Pali differs from the other Prakrits, the Sinhalese agrees with it; and this is the case not only with words but with grammatical forms. And there are several words not found in the other Prakrits or Sanskrit which are found in both Pali and Sinhalese. I have alluded to exceptions, and these deserve full consideration; but they are such as may be explained by the circumstance, to which the Buddhist traditions clearly point, that the language of Buddha's sermons was the dialect of one district of Magadha, and the language spoken by the colonisers of Ceylon that of another district. As an instance of these exceptions, I may mention the Sinhalese itiri “woman,” which clearly cannot have come to us through the Pali itthi, since the latter has lost the original r of the Sanskrit 
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page 35 note 1 A typical instance of this agreement is found in the Sinhalese dak-inavā “to see,” and the Pali dakkhati, both of which retain the a of their Sanskrit original drakshyati, while the other Prakrits have altered it to e.
page 36 note 1 See Sangarawa, D'Alwis's Sidath, p. xxxii.Google Scholar
page 37 note 1 On the analogy of the word “Sanskrit,” we ought to write “Sinhalese,” the sound represented by the n being in each case the same (anusvâra). Strictly speaking, anusvâra shouldjje represented by m or m, but it would be pedantry ta write “Saṃ skṛit” with the diacritical marks, because the word is thoroughly Anglicised; and the same may be said of the word Sinhalese. It is a matter of abiding regret to me that I was the means of introducing into Ceylon an n with a circle under it to represent anusvâra. In 1863 I read a paper before the Ceylon Asiatic Society, “On the Romanisation of the Sinhalese Alphabet,” and, to carry out my (somewhat crude) views, imported to Ceylon a set of types with diacritical marks made to my order in England. When I left Ceylon soon afterwards, the Government took over my types, which included the unsightly 
, and made nse of them, I believe, for their official system of transliteration. Hence my sense of the fitness of things is occasionally offended by the sight of the word Sinhalese written Sinhalese, a practice against which I here enter my protest.
page 38 note 1 The Ceylon chronicles give us no reason to suppose that Buddhaghosa found Mahipda's Sinhalese, which he retranslated into Pali, substantially different from the Sinhalese he himself spoke.
page 39 note 1 It is to be observed that the facts I hare been discussing tend not to advance but to throw back the Buddhist era.
page 40 note 1 This neglect reaches its climax in Beames's “Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India,” in which the author omits the Sinhalese from his scheme. In spite of this defect, Mr. Beames's work is a most valuable one, and I earnestly hope that he will continue it.
page 40 note 2 N.B. The vowels e and o in Sinhalese are short unless marked long.
page 41 note 1 It cannot be 
, which in Sinhalese becomes ata.
page 42 note 1 This expression would be admissible in English, and we say “a forest of masts,” “a forest of columns,” etc.
page 42 note 2 Since writing the above, I have seen the article 
in Böhtlingk and Roth's Dictionary, in which several references are given for the use of vana in the sense of “multitude” in classical Sanskrit, e.g. girivana “forest of mountains” (Mahâbhârata).
page 45 note 1 The ṁ is pronounced like the English and German ng at the end of a word; thus gaṁ is pronounced exactly like the German gang.
page 46 note 1 AR analogous anomaly is found in the Pali dakkhissati “he will see,” when the term -issati of the future is added to dakkhati, itself originally a future.
page 47 note 1 Siyal is the S. 
—R. C. C.
page 48 note 1 Any one reading this passage would suppose that Professor Max Müller had written upon the formation of the neuter plural in Sinhalese. This, however, is not the case, and it will hardly be believed that what Mr. D'Alwis refers to is a passage in Dr. Max Muller's well-known essay “On the Relation of the Bengali, to the Aryan and Aboriginal Languages of India” (Rep. British Association, 1817)Google Scholar, showing that the syllable dig, which forms the plural of masculine nouns in Bengali, is really a noun, the Sanskrit 
A reference, however brief, to this essay, would have saved the reader a great deal of trouble; hut Mr. D'Alwis, though he twice quotes it in his article, nowhere mentions it by name. The case of the postposition dig is curiously analogous to that of val. The example given by DrMüller, Max is paṇḍit-digeteGoogle Scholar, “in or among the pandits,” lit. “in the pandit world,” 
having acquired the secondary meaning of “world” (see p. 338Google Scholar of the Eeport).