Sinhala and Dravidian languages

The use of photography in anthropology has a complex history, particularly when it comes to representing indigenous communities through early ethnographic research. When viewing collections such as the early 20th-century images of Sri Lanka’s Vedda community captured by Charles and Brenda Seligman, it is crucial to evaluate them not just for their historical significance but also through the ethical and legal frameworks that apply today.

The British Museum holds around 2,200 artefacts donated by the Seligmans mainly from Oceania, China and Africa, as well as a similar number of photographs, including over 400 glass negatives and prints documenting the Seligmans’ 1908 field research in Sri Lanka. Although the glass slides are yet to be fully catalogued, many of their photographs were reproduced in their seminal publication, The Veddas, two copies of which are held in the British Library (Seligmann 1911; note the different spelling of the surname). The publication’s images were produced in an era devoid of any standardised ethical guidance, whether in the taking or in the publication of such images.

This article delves into the ethical implications and legal considerations surrounding these early photographs and reflects on the biases embedded in them. It also calls for and outlines potential frameworks for ‘fair and responsible’ representation of these images in contemporary settings, emphasizing the need for sensitivity in handling such cultural artifacts.

The story of Prince Vijaya in Sri Lankan Chronicles has brought diverse aspects of Sri Lanka's history and culture to the foreground. It has also evolved several arguments regarding the socio-cultural and economic divulgences of the two countries where the unique characteristics have sometimes been dissolved or diluted in order to maintain the influence and inspiration of the great tradition of the neighboring soils. However, emerges a background to analyze the existing data and evidence to revitalize the precision of the chronicler information in terms of identifying the socioeconomic and cultural background of the country during the period. A detailed survey typically highlights the nature of performing arts in the island at the time of Vijaya's arrival attenuating the established assumptions that there is an undeniable Indian influence on Sri Lanka's dance tradition. It is a proven fact that there is a transmigration of socioeconomic and cultural elements from one to another society with the migration of civilizations due to climatic, geographic, and socioeconomic reasons, one might not assume that it is an influence from the great tradition or a subculture of it. The same theory can be applied to the history and evolution of performing arts in the island from a broader perspective on par with the existing theories and the evidence. Thus, the present study engaged in a qualitative content analysis of the Vijaya-Kuveni story in Mahawamsa, Wansaththappakasini, Mahawamsa Tikawa, along with the report about the Vijayapura Research Excavation by Shiran Deraniyagala (2004) to establish facts and the basis of the history of performing arts in Sri Lanka to answer the question whether dance and music evolved with the arrival of Prince Vijaya to this island. Empirical evidence revealed from the Chronicle Mahavamsa informs that Princess Kuveni was the daughter of a regional leader of the island, and she was leading one territory in the country. She was spinning under a tree (more precisely using cotton yarn) and was looked after by a female watchdog that was by her side. When Prince Vijaya arrived in the country, there was a hermit who welcomed the prince to the island and informed him that this was a peaceful island where there were no humans: also mentioned that the land was fertile and that the prince could enjoy himself there. A proper examination and analysis of the particular scenario reveals that the economy, politics, culture, and the society of the island were not a sudden establishment, but a prolonged evolution of a standard government with a well-established operational mechanism. The settlement near the riverine basins, traditional clothing industry, agriculture as the main economic gain, the governance of city-states, the village customs, marriage traditions, and the festivities reveal that the island had been endowed with rich socio-cultural and economic systems that enriched the nation by considering its welfare and wellbeing at its best. To substantiate these particular assumptions, the Vijayapura Research Excavation in Anuradhapura by Shiran Deraniyagala reveals the remains of a civilization dating back to around 900-800 BCE. Thus, the present study aims at identifying the so-called Sri Lankan demographic identity allowing the readers to rethink and rewrite the nature of society, culture, and performing arts in the island, by blending the empirical evidence and existing archeological findings.

The Dravidian words:

*kurṭāmyö > *kurṭāmpyö / *kurṭāmpöy > Tamil kuṭampai / kurampai ‘bird's nest’, Mlm. kurampu ‘nest made by sow before littering’

seem related to a similar set:

Tam. kūṇṭ / kūṭu, Mlm. kūṭu, Btl. gūḍā ‘bird's nest’, Tel. gūḍu ‘nest/cage / niche in wall / sheath’, Pji gūḍa ‘nest / wooden trap’, PG guḍa ‘nest’

The nasals are in a different place, voicing exists, likely from metathesis *kurṭāmyö > *krumṭāyö (with *kr- / *gr- like *tr- / *dr- in *tramiḷa > Skt. dramila / draviḍa / etc.).


It seems impossible that these are unrelated to Indo-Iranian *kurla-āwya- > *ku(r)la-ā[w/m/y]a- :

*kulta-āwya- ‘home of eggs’ > Skt. kulā́ya- ‘nest’, Iran. *kulāwa- > Kurdish kulāw, *ku?āma- > Bal. kuδām, NP kunām


The shift of *w or *v > m is seen in many Indo-Iranian:

Skt. náva- ‘ young / new’, Ti. nam

Skt. náva ‘9’, Dm. noo, A. núu, Kv. nu, Ti. nom, Kh. nóγ ‘new’

G plé(w)ō ‘float/sail’, Rom. plemel ‘float/swim’, Skt. prav- ‘swim’

Skt. lopāśá-s > *lovāśá- \ *lovāyá- > Kh. ḷòw, Dk. láač \ ló(o)i ‘fox’, fem. *lovāyī > *lomhāyī > A. luuméei, Pl. lhooméi


Neither group is regular, but all must be related.  Neither set of words can directly give the other.  In the spirit of the comparative method, would it be too much to suggest that a third, older, unattested word was the source of both sets?  If any of the cognates in IE are accepted, these all would be IE, just an odd compound with odd 2 clusters that each had multiple outcomes.  Seeing that changes like *my > *mpy and *-yö > *-öy could exist in Dravidian provide valuable help in reconstructing Proto-Dravidian (if many Cy had the same change, this would be the obvious choice).


The IE sources would be *HoHwyo-m ? ‘egg’ ( < *H2avi-s ‘bird’ in some way) and:

*kurtiH2 > G. kurtía ‘wickerwork shield’, kúrtē ‘fish-basket’, Skt. kuti(:)- ‘hut’, kúla-m ‘crowd / family’, kuṭuŋgaka- ‘hut / cottage’


This is supposedly the source of Uralic *külä > F. kylä ‘village/dwelling’, Mi. kül ‘house’.  The multiple outcomes or *-rt- are not regular.  In Skt., PIE *l > r is common, but some *r / *l > l with no apparent reason.  What’s more, it sometimes matches Iranian languages (when detectable):

L. calvus ‘bald’, Skt. kulvá-, Av. kaurva-, NP kal


Fortunatov’s Law states that dentals became retroflex after *l, then *l disappeared.  This fits with Skt. l likely being retroflex, as sometimes preserved in Kh. (Skt. kīlā́la-s \ kīlālá-m ‘sweet drink / biestings? / buttermilk?’, kilāṭa- ‘cheese’, Kh. kiḷàḷ).  However, this “law” is not regular, since some VlC > VC, others > V:C, others > VCh, others unclear (Whalen 2023).

Skt. huḍa- ‘ram’, Dk. hʌldin ‘male goat’, ON *galtuz > göltr ‘boar’

*bhals-? > bhaṣá-s ‘barking/baying’, bhāṣa- ‘speech’, Li. balsas ‘voice’

*g^elt- > jaṭhára- ‘stomach’, Go. in-kilþs ‘pregnant’, OE cild, E. child

*kH2ald- = *kxald- > *kaldo- > kaḍa- ‘dumb’, Go. halts ‘*broken > lame’

*kH2ald-? > khaḍ- ‘divide/break’, khaṇḍ- ‘divide/break/destroy’

*g^helH3to- > hárita- ‘yellow(ish) / pale (yellow/red) / green(ish)’, Av. zairita- ‘yellow’
*g^hlH3t(ak)o-m > hāṭaka-m ‘gold’, Go. gulþ, E. gold

*melno- > MIr. mell, Gae. meal ‘hill’, Irish meal ‘sphere/lump/knob/knoll/heap’, Skt. máṇḍa- ‘circle/circular/round’

*meldno-? ‘slow’ > Skt. manda-, Kh. malála ‘late’, Ku. mǝlaŋ ‘slowly’, R. medlennyj

*(s)mlhno- > Latvian milna ‘cloth / garment’, Persian *mandō >> G. mandúas ‘woolen cloak’

*krt- ‘cut’? > kaṭú- ‘pungent/bitter’ (if not Drav.)

*kurtiH2 > G. kurtía ‘wickerwork shield’, kúrtē ‘fish-basket’, Skt. kuti(:)- ‘hut’, kúla-m ‘crowd / family’, kuṭuŋgaka- ‘hut/cottage’

*k(a)rstHo- > R. korósta ‘scab’, Skt. kuṣṭha-m ‘leprosy’, kúṣṭha- ‘Costus speciosus’ (-l- in kúla- ‘fruit of the kúṣṭha?’)
*krstHmo-? > Skt. kiṭibha-m ‘kind of exanthema’, kiṭima-m ‘kind of leprosy’
*kHrstmo- > MP xurmā ‘date’

I connect these since eating dates supposedly caused skin rash in Persian belief.  See Skt. kharjura- ‘kind of date’, kharjūra- ‘itch(ing)scratching/scab / wild date tree’.  This is likely folk ety. connecting 2 words of the same sound from ‘scratch > rash’ and ‘cut / pluck fruit’ (like G. karpós ‘crops/harvest/fruit/produce’, L. carpō ‘pluck/gather’, Li. kerpù ‘cut with shears’).  If *karstHo- > R. korósta, these 2 roots with *kar- might come from *kH2ar- (with > *kx- > x- in xurmā ), and *kH2rstmo- > *krstH2mo-, etc.  Since many *l > r, some *r > l in Skt., if kúla- is ‘fruit of the kúṣṭha’, it would show the effects of Fortunatov’s Law.  Though not fully regular, this would explain loss of *-r- here better than seeing kuṣṭha-m ~ kúṣṭha- as Middle Indic contamination.

The Caucasus region is famed for its rich and diverse arrays of languages and language families, often challenging European-centered views established in traditional linguistics. In this paper, we describe ongoing efforts to improve the coverage of Universal Morphologies for languages of the Caucasus region. The Universal Morphologies (UniMorph) are a recent community project aiming to complement the Universal Dependencies which focus on morphosyntax and syntax. We describe the development of UniMorph resources for Nakh-Daghestanian and Kartvelian languages as a well as for Classical Armenian, we discuss challenges that the complex morphology of these and related languages poses to the current design of UniMorph, and suggest possibilities to improve the applicability of UniMorph for languages of the Caucasus region in particular and for low resource languages in general. We also criticize the UniMorph TSV format for its limited expressiveness, and suggest to complement the existing ...

This study traces the historical development of the focus concord construction of Sinhala from the language of the pre-second millennial graffiti on the Mirror Wall at Sigiriya to the modern colloquial language, with comparison to the historical development of focus concord constructions in the south Dravidian languages Malayalam and Tamil, as well as the focus concord (kakari-musubi) construction of Japanese. I argue that the Sinhala focus concord construction originated as one particular usage of impersonal verbal nominalisations in Old Sinhala, developed into a predicative clefting construction in Classical Sinhala, and in the modern colloquial language has become a phenomenon involving verb forms showing a sort of agreement with focussed elements.

The State Hermitage Museum possesses two previously non-published stamp seals. Both of them comes from the collection of Nikolai Likhachev and are of unknown provenance. Due to the character form and iconography they could be attributed to a small and rare group of Mesopotamian seals being used during the end of Early Dynastic to the end of Old Akkadian periods. The form of these seals is unusual for
the 3rd mil. B.C. Mesopotamia where the main form for the seal
was a cylinder. However in 3rd mil. B.C. stamp seals were
mainly in use in Indus and Persian Gulf regions. This article
seeks to consider this rare type of Mesopotamian stamp seals in
a context of the cultural interaction process between Indus and
Mesopotamia during the period of well-documented trading
contacts.

Sri Lanka's small native population of "Ahikuntika" and "Kuravar" itinerant communities continues to be a very visible part of Sri Lankan society, with snake-charmers and monkey dancers a common sight in Sri Lanka's tourist areas. Sri Lanka's Ahikuntikas and Kuravars speak a highly idiosyncratic dialect of Telugu which has never been fully documented.

The aim of this paper is to show the connection between the Roma people and India through the connection between Romani and Hindi, taking into account the historical development of these two closely related languages. The Romani language is, like Hindi, a New Indo-Aryan language that originates from the central part of the northern Indian subcontinent, which means that both languages developed from the same Middle Indo-Aryan language, which originated from Old Indo-Aryan. The similarities between these two languages cover almost all parts of their grammar. The first of these are shared sound changes that took place during the development of the Middle Indo-Aryan languages from Old Indo-Aryan, which show that Romani and Hindi originated from a common Middle Indo-Aryan language. Morphological similarities between Romani and Hindi are most notable in their nominal and adjectival declension systems. Although the Hindi nominal declension paradigm consists of analytical forms built using postpositions, while that of Romani consists of synthetic forms built using agglutinative endings, their declension system is quite similar as most of the Romani agglutinative case endings share the same origins as the Hindi postpositions. The adjectival declension system, however, consists of synthetic (inflected) forms in both Romani and Hindi, with almost identical grammatical endings in both languages. Their
personal and possessive pronouns are also very similar, as are their declension paradigms and main numerals. There are also numerous lexical similarities, mostly in the basic lexicon (e.g. names of body parts, family members, food, everyday activities, etc.), while their word formation processes also partly correspond. Although the Roma have been living among various other peoples for a millennium and have learned and spoken the languages of the countries they live in on a daily basis for many generations, they have preserved their own language very well, and along with this, their connection with their ancient homeland.

The article discusses the problem of terminological differentiation of two disciplines as part of comparative linguistics, studying related languages in diachronic (compare historical linguistics) and in synchrony; for terminological marking of the second In this direction, the term "comparative synchronic linguistics" is introduced.

One of the main causes of language change is linguistic borrowing. The influence of loan words could have an impact on the phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics of a language.. At different periods in the history of Sinhala, mainly Sanskrit, Pali, Tamil, Dutch, Portuguese and English have contributed as donor languages. When considering modern Sinhala, English can be identified as the major donor language. Linguists define Literary Sinhala (LS) and Spoken Sinhala (SS) as two different varieties of the language. The diglossia situation opens up two major areas of research on modern Sinhala. This paper attempts to discuss structural changes occurred in modern Sinhala by English loan words analysing data from both Literary and Spoken Sinhala. It is a hitherto less researched area and needs extensive studying since English continues to be the main donor language in linguistic borrowing not only in Sinhala, but also in many major languages of the world. Based on available data it is evident that Literary Sinhala has been somewhat slow in adopting English loan words. Spoken Sinhala has made less or no restrictions in this regard. Further, Literary Sinhala tends to avoid using direct loan words by finding substitutes for them from another donor language, for instance Sanskrit: <computer> 'pariganakaya' (LS), 'kompiyutar eka' (SL). The phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic implications of the English loan words will be addressed in this study, and also how monolingual and bilingual native speakers of Sinhala adopt these loan words differently.

The Caucasus region is famed for its rich and diverse arrays of languages and language families, often challenging European-centered views established in traditional linguistics. In this paper, we describe ongoing efforts to improve the coverage of Universal Morphologies for languages of the Caucasus region. The Universal Morphologies (UniMorph) are a recent community project aiming to complement the Universal Dependencies which focus on morphosyntax and syntax. We describe the development of UniMorph resources for Nakh-Daghestanian and Kartvelian languages as a well as for Classical Armenian, we discuss challenges that the complex morphology of these and related languages poses to the current design of UniMorph, and suggest possibilities to improve the applicability of UniMorph for languages of the Caucasus region in particular and for low resource languages in general. We also criticize the UniMorph TSV format for its limited expressiveness, and suggest to complement the existing ...

Reviewed by Leonid Kulikov (Leiden University / Institute of Linguistics, Moscow) 1. These classes were first correctly identified and characterized, on the basis of similarity in their syntactic behavior, by Jamison (1983) as groups of 'intransitive/transitive' (I/T) verbs. Unfortunately, this important study is not mentioned in Dahl's paper. 2. Note also that, for some instances of accusative case marking, the telic interpretation is not indisputable; thus, RV 4.30.5ab yátra deva m̆ r̥ ghāyató ' víśvām̆ áyudhya éka ít should be rendered as 'where you (sc. Indra) alone fought / was fighting against all impetuous gods …' , rather than 'where you alone defeated all the raging gods…' (as Dahl translates it, p. 48). Note that the standard Geldner's (1951: I, 458) translation of this passage ('Wo du die drohenden Götter alle ganz allein bekämpftest …') does not imply the telic reading: it only refers to the process of fighting, without specifying its outcome.

Self-respect movement kept rationalism as a fundamental
yardstick in approaching any social issues. They questioned the notion of
patriarchy and were critical towards the concept of ‘love’, ‘chastity’,
‘motherhood’, and ‘prostitution’. In this context, the present paper
focuses how the self-respect movement understanding the concept of
‘love’

This paper calls attention to investigate finiteness with respect to negatives in Telugu and argues (abstract) tense decides finiteness in these clauses. Finiteness in Telugu is a complex phenomenon and it does not lend itself to a strait forward analysis. In general, clauses have been universally categorized as finite and non-finite. Yet languages seem to differ considerably in terms of the nature of the finiteness. Crosslinguistically, it has been observed that neither tense nor agreement comes under universal category. Therefore, anything which is chosen from the above two will be absent in a number of languages. However, we find that in Telugu tense is not always present overtly whereas agreement is present only in some constructions. Negatives and modals and a few embedded clauses lack agreement although they are considered to be finite. This paper examines and argues that tense plays primary role to decide finiteness in Telugu.

The Caucasus region is famed for its rich and diverse arrays of languages and language families, often challenging European-centered views established in traditional linguistics. In this paper, we describe ongoing efforts to improve the coverage of Universal Morphologies for languages of the Caucasus region. The Universal Morphologies (UniMorph) are a recent community project aiming to complement the Universal Dependencies which focus on morphosyntax and syntax. We describe the development of UniMorph resources for Nakh-Daghestanian and Kartvelian languages as a well as for Classical Armenian, we discuss challenges that the complex morphology of these and related languages poses to the current design of UniMorph, and suggest possibilities to improve the applicability of UniMorph for languages of the Caucasus region in particular and for low resource languages in general. We also criticize the UniMorph TSV format for its limited expressiveness, and suggest to complement the existing ...

Part of Speech Tagging is an important aspect of any natural language processing application like grammatical inference, information retrieval, and machine translation. The problem of tagging in is to assign most appropriate tag for each word present in a sentence based on its lexical and contextual aspects. There are mainly two types of approaches available, supervised and unsupervised. Unsupervised approach is not based on certain pre-defined rules or labelled text. We have presented here a hybrid Part-of-Speech (POS) tagger for Gujarati. Rules are devised with language experts and native language speakers. We have evaluated performance with dictionary of 30,050 words on 12,637 sentences for 30 different standard part of speech tags for Gujarati. Evaluation of the system is done on text from various domains of Gujarati. These domains includes news, essays and short stories. Our system has achieved accuracy of 82.52%

This paper presents a new comprehensive multi-level Part-Of-Speech tag set and a Support Vector Machine based Part-Of-Speech tagger for the Sinhala language. The currently available tag set for Sinhala has two limitations: the unavailability of tags to represent some word classes and the lack of tags to capture inflection based grammatical variations of words. The new tag set, presented in this paper overcomes both of these limitations. The accuracy of available Sinhala Part-Of-Speech taggers, which are based on Hidden Markov Models, still falls far behind state of the art. Our Support Vector Machine based tagger achieved an overall accuracy of 84.68% with 59.86% accuracy for unknown words and 87.12% for known words, when the test set contains 10% of unknown words.

This paper presents a new comprehensive multi-level Part-Of-Speech tag set and a Support Vector Machine based Part-Of-Speech tagger for the Sinhala language. The currently available tag set for Sinhala has two limitations: the unavailability of tags to represent some word classes and the lack of tags to capture inflection based grammatical variations of words. The new tag set, presented in this paper overcomes both of these limitations. The accuracy of available Sinhala Part-Of-Speech taggers, which are based on Hidden Markov Models, still falls far behind state of the art. Our Support Vector Machine based tagger achieved an overall accuracy of 84.68% with 59.86% accuracy for unknown words and 87.12% for known words, when the test set contains 10% of unknown words.

Language Documentation (henceforth LD) is reached at the stage in linguistics as one of the major sub-branches of the discipline. LD is a participatory applied field. However, the question of why we should document endangered languages is not seriously addressed. An attempt is made in this paper to address the question of why we should document endangered languages. Ontological, practical, and academic aspects of the objectives of documentation are discussed. Each aspect is further discussed in detail. And the distinction of description and documentation in the academic purpose of documentation is discussed in detail. Based on this discussion the paper places two questions. Whether language documentation is an advancement of descriptive linguistics or a new branch of linguistics? To what extent LD can decolonise modern linguistics.

This paper analyses the various reasons for code-mixing, and the domains where a mixed code is preferred by Tamil speakers. Sri Lanka is a multilingual country where code mixing is a communication strategy used by speakers of different indigenous languages. Mixing of Tamil and English is common speech behaviour that occurs in the discourse of educated bilinguals. There are various factors that influence the use of English in a mother tongue discourse. The research design involves qualitative approaches. The data for this study was collected by means of a questionnaire. The participants were educated urban bilinguals in the Jaffna district. The data collected from the subjects' responses were analyzed and the findings were derived. The bilinguals were required to self-report their awareness of the frequency and purposes of using code mixing in different situations in their day to day conversation. The results showed that the degree of code mixing depends on various factors such as amount of exposure to English, the medium of instruction in school and the frequency of language used in different domains, contexts and topics of discussion. This paper throws light on the fact that mixing Tamil and English facilitates communication and is performed for certain practical reasons.

Karaiyar (lit.: karai = &#39;shore&#39;; yar = &#39;people&#39;) is an indigenous Tamil speaking fishing caste inhabiting both on the coastal belt of Jaffna peninsula in Sri Lanka and Coromandel coast of Tamilnadu in South India. They share a common ethnohistory and cultural relations over several centuries; yet exhibit distinctive features of local history and cultural identity in their own terms. This study attempts to trace how Karaiyars remember, narrate, cherish and transmit their historical consciousness in terms of folk or social history. This paper also tries to bring out ethnohistorically the embedded nature of single universal system, though they are divided by Bay of Bengal. As Romila Thapar (2000; 137-38) distinguishes two types of historical consciousness: (1) the embedded history, normally found among lineage based societies (2) the externalized history, normally found in state-based systems, Karaiyars inhabiting in two different nations share both these histories. The...

తెలంగాణ భాష తమిళ పదాలు పుస్తకంలో, తమిళ భాషలో ఉన్న కొన్ని వందల పదాలు తెలంగాణ ప్రజల నోటి భాషకు, వ్యవహారానికి దగ్గరగ ఉన్నవని గుర్తించారు. వాటిలో నామవాచకాలు, సర్వనామాలు, క్రియలు, ప్రత్యయాలు, విశేషణాలు, పదబంధాలు, ఉక్తి వైచిత్రులు, జాతీయాలు వంటివి ఎన్నో ఉన్నాయి. వాటి ఆధారంగా అకారాది క్రమంలో పదాలను ఎన్నుకొని రాసిన వివరణలున్నాయి. తమిళంలో ఉన్న పదానికి గల సామీప్యతను, అర్థ పరిణామాన్ని, పద పరిణామాన్నిసరళంగా చెప్పారు.

Language is a very powerful tool for mutual understanding between people. In the increasingly globalized society we live in, there is great importance and interest in learning languages other than one's own mother tongue. Computer based teaching tools provide a potent medium through which such demand can be met conveniently. Shikshaka, a computer based teaching framework was developed for teaching languages using a dialogue-based andragogy and is aimed to fulfill the above requirement. Effective technological methodologies were used to develop the system as an interactive tool using the goal oriented approach developed by linguistic scholars. We have used the framework to implement two scenarios: to teach Tamil using Sinhala and to teach Sinhala using English. The learner's language can be customized with little effort, while the framework is flexible enough to be customizable to teach other target languages as well with some pedagogical input.

In his early years, C.C. Uhlenbeck was particularly interested in the problem of the Indo-European homeland (1895, 1897). He rejected Herman Hirt's theory (1892) that the words for 'birch' , 'willow' , 'spruce' , 'oak' , 'beech' and 'eel' point to Lithuania and its immediate surroundings and returned to Otto Schrader's view (1883, 1890) that the original homeland must rather be sought in southern Russia and may have included some of the later Germanic and Iranian territories. It is clear that the Mediterranean region and the area around the North Sea can safely be excluded because the arrival of the Indo-Europeans was comparatively recent here, as it was in Iran and the Indian subcontinent. It is difficult to be more specific within the limits of central and eastern Europe and central Asia. Uhlenbeck was impressed by the lexical correspondences between Indo-European and Semitic which had been adduced in favor of an eastern homeland but pointed out that borrowings from Semitic may have reached the Indo-Europeans through an intermediary. He agrees that the Indo-European words for trees and animals point to a moderate climate but questions the possibility of a more specific localization as well as the concept of homeland itself. Uhlenbeck identifies the Slavic word for 'dog' pĭsŭ with the Indo-European word for 'livestock' *peḱu and its original meaning as 'domestic animal'. Unlike Hirt (1895), he recognizes that the Indo-Europeans were pastoralists before they became agriculturalists, as is clear from the absence of common words for 'plough' , 'field' , 'grain' and suchlike. While Armenian shares many agricultural terms with the languages of Europe, these are absent from Indo-Iranian. The common Indo-European vocabulary reflects a stage of development when weaponry was made of stone, wood, bones and hides (cf. Schrader 1890: 320-346). It includes words for 'cart' (ὄχος), 'wheel' (κύκλος), 'axle' (ἄξων), 'yoke' (ζυγόν), 'carpenter' (τέκτων), '(wooden) house' (δόμος), 'vessel' (ναῦς), 'to plait' (πλέκω), 'to weave' (ὑφαίνω), 'to spin' (νέω), 'garment' (εἷμα) and 'to clothe' (ἕννῡμι). The population of Denmark and Scandinavia did not speak an Indo-European language before the advent of pastoralism, which puts these countries beyond the original homeland. The introduction of the cart was evidently more recent than the domestication of cattle, which were used as draught animals. All Indo-European languages have the same words for 'ox' , 'sheep' , 'goat' , 'horse' and

It has been generally believed by scholars that Vedic period was bereft of images of the Gods, though they are so numerously mentioned in the Vedas. Time and again scholar were pointing out few verses regarding the presence of some verses which allude to the images of the Vedic gods. But no images were forthcoming, and it appeared that the scholars who believed that the Vedic  religion was non iconic were right ab initio. The breakthrough came, when for the first time scholars linked the anthropomorphic figures and the therio-anthropomorphic figure with Indra  and  Varaha avatara of Vishnu.  Now the jigsaw puzzle have started to fill up and the picture is becoming clearer that the anthropomorphic figures of the Copper Hoards, part and parcel of the Ochre Colour Pottery using people, thriving primarily in the Ganga Yamuna Doab area worshiped these copper images as Indra and Vishnu. The concurrences is not only afforded by Vedic literature but also by the transitional images in stone and other mediums, which show the arms akimbo well into the Gupta period, after which the influence of the anthropomorphic figures in art generally becomes untraceable.

Malayalam, a literary Dravidian language, is spoken by 33 million people (2001 census) in the Kerala state and Lakshadweep island of India. Like other Dravidian languages Malayalam is rich in expressives and expressive constructions. Expressives in Dravidian consist of ideophones, onomatopoetic expressions, echo words, exclamations, interjections and grammatical and lexical reduplicative constructions and the like (Emeneau 1969: 274-299, 1978), Abbi 1985:159-171, 1997: 696-697, Krishnamurti 2003:485-88). Regarding the expressive in Dravidian Krishnamurti (2003:485) observes that “All these are found in the literary languages from the time of early records and need to be considered as heritage of Proto-Dravidian”. Malayalam is not an exception of this phenomenon of expressive (See the appendix of this paper; classified expressives of Malayalam is provided). Based on the evidences from literary and non-literary Dravidian languages Krishnamurti reconstructed many of the expressive patterns as Proto-Dravidian features. He further strengthens the argument that reduplicates in Indian linguistics area spread from Dravidian to other families of languages (Emeneau 1969, Abbi 1991). Malayalam shares all the general patterns of Dravidian expressives reconstructed for Proto Dravidian. Traditional grammar of Malayalam consider expressive under the category of vyākṣēpakam which covers only interjection and exclamation as the meaning of the Sanskrit term indicates (Rajarajavarma 1986 [1917]:111). Asher and Kumari (1997: 447-50) have identified a set of ideophones and interjection of Malayalam and have observed certain morphological characters of reduplication. Further advancing Asher & Kumari (1997: 447-50) an attempt is made in this paper to reveal certain morphosyntactic features of expressive construction in Malayalam. Syntactic data of expressive we have recently collected demonstrates that this underexplored linguistic phenomenon in Malayalam has certain morphosyntactic characters. Based on this study we argue that expressive construction in Malayalam is morphosyntactic. Only representative data is provided in this chapter to substantiate the argument presented. Additional data is provided in the appendix of the paper in four sections.

This study aims at studying whether the concept of regional dialectical variations had the effect on English Language users in Sri Lanka and to which extent they differ from region to region when speaking and writing in English as a second language. In order to identify this phenomenon, 125(hundred and twenty five) students ( five groups) of Sri Lanka Advanced Technological Education were randomly chosen from six regions and surveyed with twenty five structured questionnaire and an interview. Questionnaires tested formal written expressions while the interview tested formal oral expressions. Thereby the researcher examined to which extent the participants deviated from standard Sri Lankan dialect. The researcher conducted a methodical analysis of the collected data linguistically. It enabled the researcher to identify how and why each group differs from the other dialectically. They are logically treated after thorough analysis under particular linguistic categories. The combinations of the findings of the study and the knowledge gained in the process of study are used to draw conclusions of the factors that contributed to those dialectical variations. Finally the researcher has made some suggestions to go for Identical Sri Lankan Dialect rather than trying to promote regional dialectical variations since the researcher could not elucidate substantial variations among the participants of the study Index Terms-Sri Lankan Dialect, second language, dialectical variation, first language, language interference

Having shown previously how a culture type can be given a unitary description in terms of a semiotic "lens" constrained by one of the Peircean Categories ("Shamanic" culture, by Firstness), we apply this methodology to a more "fine-grained" level of analysis, by comparing the Tamil and Sinhalese cultures under the assumption that one of them (Sinhalese) is in fact a "hybrid" culture-sign. Having shown in previous work that the greater South Asian microculture may be characterized as a Firstness of Thirdness (13), in this paper we provide evidence from a variety of semiotic contexts, including language, art, and religion, that the novel or "intrusive" sign in Sinhalese culture is Firstness of Secondness (12), resulting in a hybrid culture sign that may be described as 12 x 13.

Sri Lanka Gypsy Telugu (SLGT) is a dialect of Telugu spoken by a gypsy community in Sri Lanka numbering several thousand individuals. This dialect diverges significantly from the Telugu spoken on the Indian mainland and exhibits several significant grammatical features that are best explained as resulting from contact with Colloquial Sinhala. Based on data gathered from gypsies living in the Anuradhapura area of north central Sri Lanka, this paper presents the first comprehensive description of those points of SLGT grammar that distinguish it from other forms of Telugu, including lexical and structural borrowings from Sinhala.

Having shown previously how a culture type can be given a unitary description in terms of a semiotic "lens" constrained by one of the Peircean Categories ("Shamanic" culture, by Firstness), we apply this methodology to a more "fine-grained" level of analysis, by comparing the Tamil and Sinhalese cultures under the assumption that one of them (Sinhalese) is in fact a "hybrid" culture-sign. Having shown in previous work that the greater South Asian microculture may be characterized as a Firstness of Thirdness (13), in this paper we provide evidence from a variety of semiotic contexts, including language, art, and religion, that the novel or "intrusive" sign in Sinhalese culture is Firstness of Secondness (12), resulting in a hybrid culture sign that may be described as 12 x 13.

Sri Lanka Gypsy Telugu (SLGT) is a dialect of Telugu spoken by a gypsy community in Sri Lanka numbering several thousand individuals. This dialect diverges significantly from the Telugu spoken on the Indian mainland and exhibits several significant grammatical features that are best explained as resulting from contact with Colloquial Sinhala. Based on data gathered from gypsies living in the Anuradhapura area of north central Sri Lanka, this paper presents the first comprehensive description of those points of SLGT grammar that distinguish it from other forms of Telugu, including lexical and structural borrowings from Sinhala.

This work presents the results of my research on Narmini, an enigmatic deity mentioned in the Rig Veda [32, 37, 38, 39, 81, 123].
My readings and interpretationsare partly revised, in comparison to my earlier publications [135, 136, 137-142, 144-147, 152-154].

Present paper intends to explore the process of the transformation of the case system as evidenced in the inscriptions of the Roman provinces Africa Proconsularis and Numidia. First the peculiarities of the transformation of the case system in African Latin in the pre-Christian and Christian periods will be analysed. Then the African distributional patterns of case system changes will be compared to those of other regions of the Empire selected for the survey including Spain, Gaul (including Germany), Italy, Illyricum, and the city of Rome. Finally, the results of the present analysis, especially those regarding the dialectological positioning of Ro-man Africa, will be compared with the results of the investigation of Gaeng 1992 regarding the later, Christian period.

FRANKLIN C. SOUThWORTh. Linguistic archaeology of South Asia, london: routledge curzon, 2005, pp. xiv+369. isBn 0-415-33323-7 (hbk), £95.00 this book, written by Franklin C. Southworth (until 1998 professor at the University of Pennsylvania, now retired), a renowned scholar of south Asian linguistics and specialist in both indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages, is at the crossroad of two sciences. Being intended primarily for students of history and archaeology, it deals with the aspects of linguistic research that are relevant for those who concentrate on the history and, especially, prehistory of south Asia.

Each volume in this series contains an in-depth account of the members of some of the world's most important language families. Written by experts in each language, these accessible accounts provide detailed linguistic analysis and description. The contents are carefully structured to cover the natural system of classification: phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis, semantics, dialectology, and sociolinguistics.