ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 35: Sinhalese Sinhalese is one of three languages with offi
ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 35: Sinhalese Sinhalese is one of three languages with official status in Sri Lanka, along with Tamil and English. It is an Indo-Aryan language. Like many of the languages spoken in India with a long literary history, written Sinhalese is notably different from spoken Sinhalese, representing an archaic form of the language. It is written in Sinhalese script (සිංහල අක්ෂර මාලාව), a member of the Brahmi family of scripts used throughout the subcontinent and Southeast Asia. Sinhalese lacks the four way voicing/aspiration distinction we’ve seen in other Indo-Aryan languages, but instead has a three way distinction between voiced, voiceless, and prenasalized stops. The 8 cases of Proto-Indo-European are preserved, as well as its gender distinction of animate vs. inanimate. Sinhalese marks definiteness (a/an vs. the) as a suffix, like in Romanian and the Scandinavian languages, but unlike those which add a suffix to show that a noun is definite (i.e. the something), it adds a suffix to show that the noun is indefinite (a something). -- source link