Sinhala words of Tamil origin

Sinhala words of Tamil origin came about as part of the more than 2000 years of language interactions between Sinhala and Tamil in the Island of Sri Lanka.

Kinds of loanwords

;BorrowingsThe words pertaining to the fields of commerce, administration, botany, food and military are the most numerous; this is to be expected because
*new innovations and goods usually reached the Sinhalese via the Tamils whose area of settlement separates them from the rest of South Asia and
*Tamil-speaking Muslims conducted most of the island's foreign trade since the 10th century CE.;Bilingualism and assimilationHowever it is important to note that the range of borrowings goes beyond the scope to be expected for a situation where two neighbouring peoples exchange material goods: Firstly, there are many Tamil loanwords pertaining to everyday and social life (kinship terms, body parts, ordinary activities etc.); secondly, not only lexical words (nouns, adjectives and verbs) but also at least one function word ("ōnē") has been borrowed. This--along with the deep impact Tamil has had on Sinhala syntax (e.g. the use of a verbal adjective of "to say" as a subordinating conjunction meaning "whether" and "that")--is the result of not only close coexistence but the existence of large numbers of bilinguals and a high degree of mixing, intermarriage, etc.

The borrowing process

Tamil loanwords in Sinhala can appear in the same form as the original word (e.g. "akkā"), but this is quite rare. Usually, a word has undergone some kind of modification to fit into the Sinhala phonological (e.g. "paḻi" becomes "paḷi(ya)" because the sound of /ḻ/, IPA2|ɻ, does not exist in the Sinhala phoneme inventory) or morphological system (e.g. "ilakkam" becomes "ilakkama" because Sinhala inanimate nouns (see grammatical gender) need to end with /a/, IPA2|ə, in order to be declineable).

These are the main ways Tamil words are incorporated into the Sinhala lexicon with different endings:
*With an /a/ added to Tamil words ending in /m/ and other consonants (e.g. "pālam" > "pālama").
*With a /ya/ or /va/ added to words ending in vowels (e.g. "araḷi" > "araliya").
*With the Tamil ending /ai/ represented as /ē/, commonly spelt /aya/.
*With the animate ending /yā/ added to Tamil words signifying living beings or /yā/ replacing the Tamil endings /aṉ/, /ar/, etc. (e.g. "caṇṭiyar" > "caṇḍiyā").

It can be observed that the Tamil phonemes /ḷ/ and /ḻ/ do not coherently appear as /ḷ/ in Sinhala but sometimes as /l/ as well. This is due to the fact that in Sinhala pronunciation there is no distinction between /ḷ/ and /l/; the letter /ḷ/ is merely maintained as an etymological spelling.

Time of borrowing

In many cases, the appearance of a loanword in a language indicates whether the borrowing is old or more recent: The more a word deviates from the "original" one, the longer it must have been a part of the respective lexicon, because while being used, a word can undergo changes (sometimes regular sound changes along with the native words). The inversion of this argument is not possible since loanwords already matching the linguistic requirements of the target language may remain unchanged. Thus, the word "täpäl" (Tamil "tapāl") gives away its old age because the respective umlaut processes took place before the 8th century CE; "iḍama" (Tamil "iṭam") however needn't be a recent borrowing, because no sound changes that could have affected this word have taken place in Sinhala since at least the 13th century CE.

List of words

In the following list, Tamil words are romanized in accordance with Tamil spelling. This results in seeming discrepancies in voicing between Sinhala words and their Tamil counterparts. Sinhala borrowing however has taken place on the basis of the sound of the Tamil words; thus, the word "ampalam", IPA2|ambalam, logically results in the Sinhala spelling "ambalama", and so forth. However, the Tamil language used here for comparison is Tamil as spoken in Sri Lanka.

"Note: For information on the transcription used, see National Library at Calcutta romanization and Tamil script. Exceptions from the standard are the romanization of Sinhala long "ä" (IPA| [æː] ) as "ää", and the non-marking of prenasalized stops."

References

*cite book | last = Gair | first = James | title = Studies in South Asian Linguistics| publisher = Oxford University Press |date=1998 | location = New York | pages = 368 | isbn = 0-19-509521-9
*Geiger, Wilhelm: Linguistic Character of Sinhalese, in: Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Ceylon), Vol. XXXIV
*Gunasekara, A.M.: "A Comprehensive Grammar of the Sinhalese Language", Colombo 1891 (reprint New Delhi 1986), ISBN 81-206-0106-8 (§234: Naturalised and derived words from Tamil)

ee also

*List of Sinhala words of Portuguese origin
*List of Sinhala words of Dutch origin
*Sinhalese words of English origin

External links

* [http://www.eelavar.com/eelam/pageview.php?ID=15&SID=1003 Article on Sinhala-Tamil historical relations]
* [http://www.lanka.info/dictionary/EnglishToSinhala.jsp Tamil Sinhala online dictionary]
* [http://www.tamilnation.org/heritage/sivaratnam.htm Tamil language impact in Sri Lanka through the ages (partly Tamil POV)]
* [http://www.sundayobserver.lk/2003/01/26/fea15.html Article on Sanskritisms in Sinhala (partly based on opinion)]