Sinhala one of the world’s most creative scripts

RANDOM THOUGHTS By Neville de Silva

Sunday Times
11.29.2009

Unknown to the media and most in Sri Lanka the Sinhala language has
won international recognition.
More precisely, it is the Sinhala script rather than the language
itself that has been named as one of the world’s 16 most creative
alphabets
among today’s functioning languages, some of them among the oldest
in the world. Though the elevation of the Sinhala script to this
position of significance happened early last month it has gone unsung
and unhonoured
even by scholars and academics, leave alone the average Sri Lankan who
seems to have more mundane matters to think about than the esoteric
intricacies of script and sound.
The individual responsible for gaining the Sinhala alphabet this
eminence among the written scripts of the world is J.B. Disanayaka, a
former Professor of Sinhala at the University of Colombo who made an
irrefutable case for
placing the Sinhala alphabet among the world’s most creative ones.
The nine international scholars who acted as judges at the first World
Character Conference in Seoul, South Korea last month could not but
agree with
Disanayaka, currently Sri Lanka’s Ambassador to Thailand, and
recognize some unique features in the Sinhala alphabet and so place it
on the world list.
It is significant that of the 16 alphabets listed as the most creative
in the world, 13 are what could be called Asian languages in that they
originated in what is geographically the Asian continent. The three
European languages are Greek, Italian (Roman) and Armenian. The Asian
languages are Arabic, Burmese (Myanmar), Cambodian, Chinese, Hebrew,
Indian Devanagari, Indian
Tamil, Japanese, Korean, Laotian, Mongolian and Thai. The fact that in
such a galaxy of Asian languages, some of the oldest languages still
in use, the Sinhala script should find recognition speaks for its
uniqueness. So Sinhala and Tamil, the two main languages in use in Sri
Lanka, find themselves
in the distilled list of scripts considered the most creative in the
world.
The founder of this World Character Conference is a Korean academic
Soon Jick Bae who spent nearly 25 years travelling the world trying to
identify countries that have created their own alphabets. He narrowed
it down to 16 that included Sri Lanka. It was during his travels that
he went to the Sri Lanka diplomatic mission in Chennai (Madras) last
year to get a visa to go to Colombo and met Deputy high commissioner
P.M. Amza.
Amza suggested that instead of going to Colombo in search of an expert
in the subject he should go to Bangkok and talk to Sri Lanka’s
ambassador there J.B. Disanayaka which he did. That is how Ambassador
Disanayaka, still pursuing his love for linguistics and scholarship,
found himself centre stage defending before the nine-judge
international panel of scholars, Korean Soon Jick Bae’s instinctive
appreciation that Sinhala deserved a place among the select group of
scripts.
Once Soon Jick Bae identified what he thought were distinctive
scripts, he
had his impressions confirmed by scholars. He then invited the chosen
scholars to attend the conference and convince the judges of the
uniqueness of the respective scripts. Disanayaka in his presentation
said that Sinhala has been in continuous use for 2500 years at
least. Genetically Sinhala is related to classical Indian languages
such as Sanskrit and Pali. Sinhala occupies a unique position within
the Indo-Aryan family of languages.
The official introduction of the script by the Buddhist monk Mahinda
who brought Buddhism to Sri Lanka, goes back to the mid- 3rd century
BC. That script was known as the Brahmi script and was one of the two
ancient scripts used in India at the time. Historical and
archaeological evidence points to
the fact that writing existed in Sri Lanka before the introduction of
the Brahmi script. Evidence of this is the discovery of several
symbols in the earliest Brahmi inscriptions found here that do not
rightly belong to the Brahmi script. For well over two millennia this
Brahmi script passed through
the evolutionary process leading to the eventual birth of the modern
Sinhala script.
The latest Sinhala alphabet is that which has been approved by the
International Standards Organisation (ISO) and consists of 61 letters
(though only
58 are in use), a process in which Disanayaka played a leading role at
a conference in Greece.
So what is it that makes the Sinhala script unique and deserving of a
place among the most creative alphabets in the world?
Disanayaka in presenting the case in Seoul identified two unique
features.

Unfortunately limited space and my computer keyboard inhibit me from
reproducing these particular Sinhala characters which would have shown
more clearly the uniqueness. Suffice it to say that while the English
letter =80=9Ca’ stands for both the short `a’ (as in at) and
the long `a’ (as in ass), the Sinhala alphabet has two sets of special
characters to represent these two vowel sounds.
As for the five consonant letters, they are not found in any other
Indo-European or Dravidian language. But they are found in the
Maldivian language Divehi which is an off-shoot of the Old Sinhala.
The significance of the evolution of the Sinhala script is that it has
a complete set of visual symbols to represent sounds. Apart from the
fact that
Sinhala has created its own alphabet, it has helped the evolution of
other
languages such as Thai. It happened in the 11th century during the
Sukhothai period when Sri Lankan Buddhist monks resident in the then
Thai capital city inspired the creation of the Thai script by King
Ramkhamhaeng.
It seems a curious coincidence that the Sri Lanka ambassador to
Thailand is also accredited to Cambodia and Laos for the languages of
all four countries are now recognized as among the most creative in
the world.