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The lexicography of Sinhala Sandagomi Coperahewa Contents Introduction ........

The lexicography of Sinhala Sandagomi Coperahewa Contents Introduction ....................................................................................... 2 Discussion ......................................................................................... 4 Historical overview of ancient Sinhala lexicography ........................................ 4 Development of modern Sinhala lexicography ............................................... 6 Sinhala as ofﬁcial language and the need for practical dictionaries ......................... 11 The current status of Sinhala lexicographical work .......................................... 14 References ........................................................................................ 15 Abstract This chapter begins with an introduction to Sinhala, an Indo-Aryan and South Asian language spoken by the Sinhalese – the largest ethnic group in Sri Lanka. The historical overview of ancient Sinhala lexicography provides a summary of oldest Sinhala lexicons (nighaṇṭu), and the impact of Pali and Sanskrit lexico- graphical compilations on Sinhala. The sixteenth century saw the initial impact of European colonial power on Sri Lanka, and the subsequent periods witnessed the compilation of dictionaries in the European tradition in Sri Lanka. The linguistic endeavors of Dutch and British missionaries led to a variety of lexicographical works in Sinhala. The year 1927 marked the beginning of a government- sponsored Sinhala dictionary project, which aimed to compile an etymological dictionary of Sinhala under the direction of the German Indologist, Professor Wilhelm Geiger. With the expansion of linguistic activity in Sinhala, and the demand for Sinhala as an ofﬁcial language in the country, there was a need for practical dictionaries in the 1940s to 1960s. During this period, several attempts were made to produce Sinhala – Sinhala and English – Sinhala dictionaries for use in schools and government departments. The government Sinhala dictionary project dragged on for 65 years and was ﬁnally completed in 1992. The present S. Coperahewa (*) Department of Sinhala, University of Colombo, Colombo, Sri Lanka e-mail: sandagomi@sinh.cmb.ac.lk © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2022 P. Hanks, G.-M. de Schryver (eds.), International Handbook of Modern Lexis and Lexicography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45369-4_108-1 1 century has witnessed the publication of many bilingual dictionaries, and spe- cialist dictionaries for many domains. Since the 1990s, computer technology has had a tremendous impact on Sinhala lexicography, and dictionaries have become available both in CD-ROM format and online. New projects, such as the building of Sinhala corpora and software tools for language analysis and lexicography, continue to be important developments for current Sinhala lexicography. Introduction Sinhala (commonly referred to in earlier times as Sinhalese/Singhalese) is the language spoken by the Sinhalese, the largest ethnic group of the island of Sri Lanka (earlier known as Ceylon). Today it is one of the two ofﬁcial languages of the island (the other being Tamil, which is also spoken in southern India, mainly in Tamil Nadu). Sinhala is an Indo-Aryan language and has its roots in classical Indian languages (but is spoken nowhere else in the subcontinent). It is therefore related to modern North Indian languages such as Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi and Kashmiri. The Maldivian language (Dhivehi, Divehi) is an offshoot of Sinhala, but diverged from the latter around the tenth century AD. Dhivehi and Sinhala developed in a different way to the other Indo-Aryan languages because of their separation by about 1000 km of Indian Ocean. As an island language, Sinhala has a number of features that make it especially interesting to the scholar of South Asian languages and the linguistic history of South Asia (De Silva 1979, Disanayaka 2012). Sinhala also occupies a unique position among modern Indo-Aryan lan- guages, because it is the only living language which goes back to the third century BC in an uninterrupted line of chronological records, representing every historical phase up to the present. The founding editors of the Dictionary of the Sinhalese Language (Geiger and Jayatilaka 1935) divided the history of the Sinhala language into four major periods: 1. Sinhala Prakrit – from 2nd C. BC to 3rd or 4th C. AD (Ancient Brahmi inscriptions). 2. Proto Sinhala – from the 4th C. to the 8th C. (Later Brahmi inscriptions). 3. Medieval Sinhala – from the 8th C. to the middle of the 13th C. (Inscriptions and older literature). 4. Modern Sinhala – from the middle of the 13th C. to the present time (classical literature and modern works). Sinhala is separated from the other Indo-Aryan languages by the extensive area of southern India inhabited by people who speak Dravidian languages. Owing to its close contact with Tamil, Sinhala has acquired some of its linguistic features, thus providing an excellent example of linguistic convergence in a “linguistic area” (Coperahewa 2007). The inﬂuence of Tamil on Sinhala vocabulary has been a topic of much interest among language scholars. Some Tamil loanwords appear in 2 S. Coperahewa Sinhala in the same form as the original, but others have undergone some degree of modiﬁcation in order to ﬁt into the Sinhala phonological or morphological systems. The structure of the Sinhala language has also been inﬂuenced considerably by its Dravidian neighbor, Tamil (Karunatillake 2011a). Like other South Asian languages, Sinhala has a long historical record of writing. The origins of the Sinhalese writing system derive from the ancient Indian script known as Brāhmī. This script was ﬁrst introduced to the island in the third century BC, when Buddhism was brought to Sri Lanka, and the earliest records of the Sinhala language are found in cave and rock inscriptions written in this script. Written literary works are available from the tenth century, such as the Dhampiyā Atuvā Gætapadaya, a glossary to the Pali commentary on the Buddhist canon. The composition of literary works in ancient Sri Lanka appears to have been largely in the hands of religious dignitaries, especially Buddhist bhikkhus. The Sinhala lan- guage, along with Pali, played a major role in the development of Theravada Buddhist literature. The early exegetical works, and translations of Pali texts, show that the study of language and grammar had become a key part of Sinhala scholar- ship (Godakumbura 1955). Sinhala Grammars were composed on the model of Sanskrit systems. The earliest extant grammar of Sinhala, Sidat Saňgarāva, was compiled during the thirteenth century. This work dealt largely with the writing conventions and grammatical rules applicable for versiﬁcation, although later gram- marians interpreted the rules of Sidat Saňgarāva as suitable for prose texts as well. The Sinhalese grammarians of this period recognized three categories of words: (1) Indigenous words (nipan/nishpanna), (2) Loanwords (tasama/tatsama), and (3) Derived words (tabava/tadbhava) (Gair and Karunatillake 2013). The study of words and their meanings was a part of the curriculum in local educational institu- tions (piriven) dating back to the ﬁfteenth century or earlier. As a language with a fairly long history of written literature, Sinhala is a “diglossic” language; that is, different varieties are used for spoken/colloquial and written purposes. In contrast to Spoken Sinhala, the grammatical structure of Liter- ary Sinhala is more complex, closer to the classical idiom, and its lexicon includes more Sanskrit and Pali words. Moreover it employs classical words (or Eḷ̣u lexical items; Eḷ̣u is the c. 3rd C. BC Middle Indo-Aryan language – or Prakrit – from which Sinhala derives) that are no longer in common use. In the development of Sinhala as an indigenous literary language and the local medium for the Buddhist canon, Pali served as the role model for religious texts, and Sanskrit as the ideal for secular literary expression. Even early Sinhalese writers adopted Sanskrit phraseology in their discourses, rather than that of Pali. Sinhala, whose long and unbroken tradition of writing and literature spans more than a millennium, witnessed several changes in its status and its corpus during the period of colonial rule that began in the early sixteenth century. During this period, greater prestige was naturally accorded to the languages of the rulers. The Portu- guese, Dutch, and British occupations of Sri Lanka saw large numbers of words entering the Sinhala language from the colonists’ respective European languages. Unlike the earlier Tamil loanwords, most loanwords of European origin rarely appear in Sinhala in their original form, but ﬁrst undergo a process of naturalization The lexicography of Sinhala 3 (Gunasekara 1891, Sannasgala 1976: 51). By the time the Dutch wrested control of the coastal areas of Sri Lanka from the Portuguese in the early seventeenth century, a large number of words of Portuguese origin had been in use in Sinhala for nearly a 100 years. British rule, on the other hand, was more comprehensive and homoge- neous, and brought the people into close association with the English language and its literature, as well as with Western thought in general. English was the ofﬁcial language of Sri Lanka from 1815 to 1956 and still exerts a tremendous inﬂuence on both the vocabulary and the structure of Sinhala. Discussion Historical overview of ancient Sinhala lexicography The tradition of dictionary making was already well-established in India, and provided models for later lexicographical works in the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages of India and Sri Lanka. The Sanskrit term nighaṇṭu (nighandu in Pali) denoted the subject of lexicography, and was adopted later by Sinhala. It is evident that the early Sinhalese scholars had access to dictionaries of Sanskrit words (Godakumbura 1955: 321). The Amarakośa was a thesaurus compiled by Amarasimha, uploads/Litterature/ the-lexicography-of-sinhala.pdf