Talk:Loanwords in Sri Lankan Tamil/Archive 2

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Tamil borrowings from Sinhalese

Place names such as Anuradhapura is it a valid entry ?then over 900 places names in Jaffna Peninsula alone can qualify. Kodikamam, Chunakam, Valligamam......

Also Pereherai, never heard other words such as Grama Sevaka are neo-Sanskritisms, that is words created by the government of Sri Lanka to deploy a modern way of life and words needed for it. So they are artificial words common to Sinhalaese and Tamil created out of Sanskrit. Just my thoughtsRaveenS 19:12, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Talada Maligai -> again like a place name, cant consider this term a borrowing. It is like calling Windsor palace in Tamil a borrowing. Further needs to investigate whether Maligawa in Sinhalese is a borrowing from Maligai in Tamil ?or common borrowing from Sanskrit ?RaveenS 19:44, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I agree with you. We should not count the place names. By the way, "Anuradhapuraya" of course is not a Sinhala word, that would be "Anurapura" or something like that.

Neither should we keep the Sanskritisms. Some of them may have entered Sri Lankan Tamil through Sinhala influence, but still they aren't actual Sinhala words.

Wow, "maaligaava"/"maaligaya" might actually be Tamil. Don't let our Sinhala friends know that! ;-) Anyway, I can't find "maaligaa" or even "maali" (with a satisfying meaning) in my Monier-Williams Sanskrit dictionary (and that's considered one of the best).

Let's wait a little to see if the others have an opinion on this topic. Krankman 19:54, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Sanskrit has the word, but it is quite possibly a borrowing from Dravidian, inasmuch as Dravidian has several cognates (e.g. Tamil māṭi and mēṭai) whilst Sanskrit has none. The Sanskrit form of the word is mālaka, which you'll almost certainly find in your M-W. In Sanskrit, it means (amongst other things) a white house with an upper floor. I know almost no Pali, but it probably had a cognate. However, given that the Sinhala word is much closer in meaning to the Tamil word than the Sanskrit, it seems likely that it was at least influenced by Tamil. -- Arvind 22:09, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

To change the topic completely, Krankman, if you know some Sinhala, could you please take a look at whether the interwiki link to the Sinhalese wikipedia on Tamil people leads to the correct article? It currently leads to si:සිංහල ජාතිය which seems to be about the Sinhalese rather than Tamils, but since I know nothing about Sinhala I'm a little reluctant to change the interwiki. -- Arvind 22:09, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Well, that actually seems like a joke. The article linked from "Tamil people" in the Sinhala Wikipedia is on the Sinhalese. I'll manually remove it. I still haven't figured out how to use Sinhala script to search the Sinhala Wikipedia, unfortunately (and "demala jaatiya" is not to be found). But let's not get excited about that--the Sinhala Wiki is still very small, so let's wait how it develops and not think that it is bad intention. :-) Krankman 23:08, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

It's a fairly funny joke too, it certainly made me chuckle when I first saw it. Thanks to the efficient bots that prowl interwiki links, the link has also ended up in the two Norwegian wikipedias and probably a good number of other wikis as well. I'll take it out of the Norwegian articles at least. Incidentally, since the Sinhalese wikipedia still has this article, it's probably safe to assume they don't have an article under "demala jatiya" as yet. -- Arvind 23:15, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Krankman, I would like to know how "Anuradhapura" is "not a Sinhala word." I was under the impression that Sinhala is classified as an Indo-Aryan language and one with a Prakrit basis. "Anurapura" would be the Elu equivalent. Both are Sinhala words (ie synonyms). What you call "Sanskritisms" are part and parcel of the Sinhalese language and have been so for more than a thousand years. Please see the difference between "loan words" and "inheriting" here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loanword#Distinction_between_borrowing_and_inheriting

If you take these so-called "Sanskritisms" out because you consider them "foreign", the Sinhala language would collapse. Besides that, these so-called "Sanskritisms" have been modified, often more than once and are unique to the Sinhala language. Is there such a thing called a "Graama Sevakaya" in Hindi/Bengali/Marathi/Urdu/etc? Is there such a thing called a "Pradeshiya Sabha" in Hindi/Bengali/Marathi/Urdu/etc? I would venture and say "no" because these terms are Sinhala and are used in the Sinhala language. They are Sinhala words that have entered Sri Lankan Tamil. So I'm afraid I strongly disagree with you on "taking out" what you call "Sanskritisms."

I would also contend that the title of the articles "Portuguese words in Sinhala" and "Dutch words in Sinhala" and "Tamil words in Sinhala" are incorrect because the words in the Sinhalese language that have been borrowed from these languages aren't Portuguese, Dutch or Tamil words ANYMORE. They are now SINHALA WORDS just as much as "ablation", "absorb" and accompany" are ENGLISH WORDS that have been DERIVED from French. A more correct title would be "Naturalised and derived words from Portuguese/Dutch/Tamil." - Ben 22:17, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Hello Ben! I am going to be somewhat brief here because I just spent twenty minutes answering your questions, just to lose them somehow after pressing "Save page". Grrrr.

If you are not merely posing, I get the impression that you have some knowledge on the subject. Why not get registered so we know with whom we are dealing?

Anyway:

• Concerning "Anuradhapuraya" - apart from the "ya" in the end that designates a foreign word in Sinhala, no actual (etymologically derived) Sinhala word contains any aspirated stops (and has not for at least 1,500 years). None. Look it up anywhere you want (Geiger, Matzel, Paolillo, Gair etc.). Those are not "Sinhala" words.
• "Sinhala words" are words from the language Sinhala, not from Sanskrit. It's that simple. Their non-occurence in other Indian languages doesn't count.
• Sinhala would never collapse if you eliminated the Sanskrit words. It might be a problem at first, but all the words are there. Sinhala is very rich, no problem at all getting along without Sanskrit. Just as getting along without English.
• Your extremely politically correct point of view on "naturalised" words is annoying. Foreign words stay foreign words. They may be words unidentifyable as foreign to the speaker, but they stay foreign material. Otherwise, we could just get rid of linguistics because everything can be anyything, from some (your?) point of view.

Please keep reasoning and don't SCREAM or shout! Greetings, Krankman 22:53, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Hi Krankman, thanks for your reply. However, if we are to avoid a possible edit war I think we need to come to an agreement. I don't know where you got the word "ya" at the end of Anuradhapura. Perhaps it's some Sinhalese dialect? In Sinhala, "in Anuradhapura" is rendered as "AnuradhapurE" not AnuradhapuraYE. Kandy is not rendered "Nuwara PuraYA" but "Nuwara Pura" or "Nuwara" for short. I don't understand you when you say that "Ya" at the end of of word denotes "a foreign word in Sinhala." If this is so there would be heck of a lot of words that are supposedly "foreign" in the Sinhalese language. Maintaining that "Anuradhapura" is not a Sinhala word is like maintaining that "country" is not an English word but a French one.

I am very much interested in your definition of the Sinhala language. What exactly is it? Do you believe it is some isolated language that doesn't belong to any family that popped out of nowhere? I would argue that the Sinhalese language INHERITED words from Sanskrit and other Prakrit tongues - they are not "loan words" like the naturalized and derived words from Portuguese, Dutch and Tamil that now exist in the language. The "ancestral language" for Sinhala is Sanskrit/Prakrit is it not? So I would argue that words from these are not "foreign." Once again, please see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loanword#Distinction_between_borrowing_and_inheriting

The Sinhalese alphabet is capable of writing all Sanskrit sounds and aspirated sounds do exist and have done so for a mighty long time; how do you think the Pali scriptures were written down in Sri Lanka?

"Pali was originally a spoken language with no alphabet of its own. It wasn't until about 100 BCE that the Tipitaka was first fixed in writing, by Sri Lankan scribe-monks who wrote the Pali phonetically using their own Sinhala alphabet."

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/bullitt/theravada.html

100 BCE - that's more than 1000 years ago when the Sinhalese alphabet had the capicity to write down aspirated sounds. What you seem to be referring to is the Elu alphabet which is much smaller and deficient of the mentioned features and going way back into mythological Vijayan times and before. However the Sinhalese language has grown and moved on and this is certainly not the current alphabet that is used. Using the Elu alphabet as the basis of determining of what is and what is not a 'Sinhala word' isn't something that I see as very helpful. We might as well throw out all the vocabulary developed over the last thousand years or so.

Let me me follow your line of thinking for a little and use examples from Gunasekara's A Comprehensive Grammar of the Sinhalese language. How does what you call "Sinhala" distinguish between grass, desire, and the female breast? It can't, if we throw out what you call "Sanskritisms" because it would be tana, tana and tana respectively. How would what you call "Sinhala" distinguish between colour, sore, jungle? It can't because it would be vana, vana, and vana. The only saving grace would be that there are two ways of writing "n."

I think my comments about the innacurate nature of calling the mentioned lists such as "List of Portuguese words in Sinhala" stands true. They simply are NOT Portuguese words anymore. Popping them into the Portuguese language will make you unintelligble to speakers of the Portuguese language. They are now Sinhalese words that are understood by Sinhalese speakers. However they are words that have been NATURALIZED or DERIVED FROM Portuguese. So I stand by my previous comments and would suggest that the titles of these articles be changed.

Check out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_words_of_French_origin

Do you think it would be more accurate to title it "French words in the English language"? I certainly don't think so.

You say "Their non-occurence in other Indian languages doesn't count." Well what about German "und" and English "and" - does this mean that the word "and" is not an English word at all but actually a German word? Would you say that any English word that can be traced back to the Germanic family of languages is not "English"?

Without what you call "Sanskritisms", Sinhala would be non functioning language bereft of any significant vocabulary. But then I suppose that is what you call "Sinhala"?

- Ben 02:51, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

Since I know no Sinhala, I can't comment on whether the words are loan words or inherited words. However, since Ben raised the question, I would like to point out that a "Gram Sevak" (from Sanskrit "Grama Sevaka") is the Hindi name for the secretary attached to a Gram Panchayat. Pradeshiya Sabha is also quite intelligible in Hindi and Marathi, and means State Council or State Assembly. An organisation might, for example, use it in the names of its local chapters. I assume it means Municipal Council in Sinhala. So the words do exist, albeit with different meanings. -- Arvind 23:38, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Well according to Krankman, "Gram Sevak" would not be a Hindi term but actually Sanskrit. It would be two "foreign words" in the Hindi language. Ditto for Pradeshiya Sabha.

Here is small a list of common words currently used both in Hindi and Sinhala, and that have similar meanings:

• English - Hindi - Sinhalese
• history - itihaas - itihaasaya
• honour - maan - maanaya
• mouse - miyan - meeyaa
• last - antim - antima
• sky - aakaash - aakaashaya
• love - prem - premaya
• medal - padak - padakkama
• natural - swaabhaavik - swaabhaavika
• necessary - aavashyak - avashya
• night - raat - raatriya
• question - prashna - prashnaya
• riches - dhan - dhanaya

Of course, none of the above (to follow Krankman's line of thinking), are actually Hindi or Sinhala words, they are "foreign words" from Sanskrit.

Clozapine 05:12, 14 July 2006 (UTC) [Previously Ben]