Appendix:Sinhalese words of Tamil origin

This appendix is about Sinhalese words of Tamil origin.

The Sinhalese language has borrowed a great many loanwords from Tamil during the more than 2000 years of coexistence of the Sinhalese and Tamil communities on the island of Sri Lanka

The 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 ("Moors") conducted most of the island's foreign trade since the 10th century CE.

However 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 Sinhalese 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.

Tamil loanwords in Sinhalese 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 Sinhalese phonological (e.g. paḻi becomes paḷi(ya) because the sound of /ḻ/, , does not exist in the Sinhalese phoneme inventory) or morphological system (e.g. ilakkam becomes ilakkama because Sinhalese inanimate nouns (see grammatical gender) need to end with /a/, , in order to be declineable).

These are the main ways Tamil words are incorporated into the Sinhalese 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 Sinhalese but sometimes as /l/ as well. This is due to the fact that in Sinhalese pronunciation there is no distinction between /ḷ/ and /l/; the letter /ḷ/ is merely maintained as an etymological spelling.

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 Sinhalese since at least the 13th century CE.

In the following list, Tamil words are romanized in accordance with Tamil spelling. This results in seeming discrepancies in voicing between Sinhalese words and their Tamil counterparts. Sinhalese borrowing however has taken place on the basis of the sound of the Tamil words; thus, the word ampalam, /ambalam/, logically results in the Sinhalese spelling ambalama, and so forth.

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Note: Exceptions from the standard are the romanization of Sinhalese long "ä" () as "ää", and the non-marking of prenasalized stops.

• 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 (§234: Naturalised and derived words from Tamil)

• Article on Sinhalese -Tamil historical relations
• Tamil Sinhalese online dictionary
• Tamil language impact in Sri Lanka through the ages (partly Tamil POV)
• Article on Sanskritisms in Sinhalese (partly based on opinion)