Vedda (language)
The Vedda language is spoken by the Veddas who are native to Sri Lanka , formerly Ceylon. Along with the Nahali and Kusunda , they are the direct linguistic descendants of people who were probably the oldest inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent. According to Ethnologue , there were around 2500 Veddas left in 2002. However, the status of the language is now almost extinct as it slowly moves towards Sinhala. Today, due to their small number, the Veddas are considered more of a caste rather than a separate ethnic group. The most widely spoken language in Sri Lanka is Sinhala , an Indo-Aryan language . About 74% of the people in Sri Lanka speak Sinhala, another 18% speak Tamil , a Dravidian language , and the remaining 8% of the population speak various minority languages, including the Vedda.
history
When the Sinhalese and Tamils arrived in Sri Lanka around the same time in the second half of the first millennium BC, they were not the first on the island, but the Veddas were there before them. The Veddas are the indigenous people of Sri Lanka. It is believed that the so-called "Veddic race" represented the original population of the entire Indian subcontinent, which was then thinned with the emergence of the Dravid and Indo-Aryans . From ancient songs one can conclude that the Veddas were native to large areas of Sri Lanka. There is evidence that the Vedda areas once included the whole of the Uva and large parts of the central and northern provinces. Today the Veddas are still in a small region in the northern Uva and southern Tamankaduwa ( north-central province ). The resulting contact with the immigrant Sinhalese and Tamils also brought about language contact. This language contact arose primarily through barter between the Veddas and the Sinhalese or the Tamils.
The European discovery of the Vedda
The discovery of the Vedda by Europeans and its classification can roughly be divided into three different stages. The first observers of the Vedda, including Nevill and Marrambe, described it as an independent language, which is probably related to their observation in which the Vedda differs from the Sinhala spoken otherwise in Sri Lanka. Later scholars, including Parker, the Seligmanns or Geiger, viewed the Vedda as just a dialect of Sinhala. However, recent studies by de Silva tend to classify the Vedda as Creole , which arose due to the contact situation between the Vedda and the Sinhalese.
Vedda as a language
The first observations on the language of the Vedda were made by Rijklof van Goens , a general of the Dutch East India Company who was Governor of Ceylon from 1659 to 1672 and Governor General of the Dutch East Indies from 1678 to 1681, in 1675, where he wrote, that the Vedda language is much more similar to Sinhala than Tamil. Fernaõ de Queyroz then mentioned in his manuscript from 1686 that the language of the Vedda was very difficult to understand. It is not pure and simple Sinhala, but only consists of a few rough and very poorly pronounced words. John Bailey then documented the first Vedda word list in 1863. He was also the first to make published data on the Vedda language possible, in the form of an English-Veddish-Sinhala word list, which consisted of 83 items and which also included a list of Veddic personal proper names for men and women. Other observations of him include hunting, food, and appearance.
Vedda as a dialect
In 1821, John Davey wrote that the Vedda language appeared to be a dialect of Sinhala and that it would be incomprehensible to people who speak Sinhala, except for a few individual words. There were also negative voices about the language of the Veddas, for example by Gillings, who said their language was a corrupt dialect of Sinhala. The Veddas are able to speak and understand the common language (Sinhala), but prefer to speak an inferior dialect among themselves. Parker, on the other hand, claimed that the Veddic language was to a greater extent a slang of Sinhala, but was slightly changed in form and accent. It is precisely these differences, especially in the spoken sense, that make it a fairly unknown language to someone who is not particularly familiar with it. Gair also supports the theory that the Vedda language is basically a dialect of Sinhala. In 1893, the Sarasin brothers established that the Vedda language was based on Sinhala, and had apparently been so since the 17th century. However, the Vedda did not completely coincide with Sinhala. The brothers noticed that many Vedda words, especially words that are important to the Vedda such as ax, bow and arrow, were not known to Sinhala interpreters.
Vedda as Creole
The language of the Veddas is strongly influenced by Sinhala and Tamil and in this sense can also be viewed as a kind of Creole language. De Silva dealt intensively with it and worked mainly with the Sinhala Creole Vedda. She found that today's Vedda, due to the strong influence of Sinhala and Tamil, must be quite different from the original Vedda, which was spoken a few centuries ago. The influence of the Sinhala lexicon and sentence structure is very evident in the Sinhala areas, and the same is true in the respective Tamil areas, where the Tamil lexicon and sentence structure are easily recognizable. De Silva further argues that the modern Vedda is a Creole based on the original Vedda language, with Sinhala as the main contributing source. According to their discoveries, the Creole Vedda differs from Sinhala in morphology, while the Creole vocabulary contains a large number of Sinhala loanwords. However, many of these loanwords are not known to the Sinhalese. Examples are galräkki for ax, cappi for bird or bucca for bush. Geiger also noticed that Sinhala also contains words that occur in the Vedda language but have no Indo-Aryan origin and cannot be etymologically derived from Old or Middle Indian, such as kola for leaf or dola for pig. It is not known today how much of the original Vedda language is left, but it is now probably extinct.
Phonology
In the Vedda the phonetic realization of the palatal affricates c and j is very common, in Sinhala it is not. Furthermore, the Vedda has a c wherever Sinhalese has an s . For example, the Sinhala word for head, isa , is ica in the Vedda . In the Vedda, the suffix - pojja is also very often added to loan words from Sinhala. The Sinhala word for weight, bara , becomes barapojja in the Vedda . The preference for palatalization in the Vedda is also evident in the transformations that some Sinhala loanwords go through. The Sinhala word for eye, äha / äsa , for example, becomes äcpojja / äjjejj in the Vedda .
morphology
Vedda is very different from Sinhala in morphological terms. In the Vedda there is an animated vs. inanimate gender system which is quite different from the Sinhala system. What also occurs frequently in the Vedda are simplifications and reductions of Sinhala forms. Furthermore, the pronouns in Veddic have no differentiation of the number , as they do in Sinhala.
noun
The formal Vedda nouns have two kinds of suffixes , those for animate nouns and those for inanimate nouns. The animate suffixes are - ätto for personal pronouns , - pojjaa and - raaccaa for personified nouns and - läätto for all other animate nouns. However, personified nouns are very rare in the Vedda. Examples of these animate suffixes are: deyyalääto for God, panniläätto for worm, meeätto for I / we, irapojjaa for sun, giniraaccaa for fire. The inanimate suffixes are - pojja , - tana , - gejja , - rukula , - danda and - raacca and are arranged here according to the frequency of their occurrence. The suffixes - rukula and - danda appear only in nouns denoting body parts, while the suffix - tana seems to have an obsolete quality. Examples of the inanimate suffixes are: viidipojja for street, kavitana for poetry, kirigejja for coconut, ayrukula for eye, ugurudanda for throat, giniraacca for fire. All of these suffixes are usually used in the plural and singular, and the specification is derived from the verbal and non-verbal context. Such an almost complete dependency of the verbal (and non-verbal) context for a semantic specification is characteristic of contact languages, which strongly suggests that the Vedda is a Creole. Because with natural languages the semantic specification - unlike the creole languages - is achieved by inflection . The conversion of Sinhala nouns into Veddic nouns works as follows: With the animate nouns, the suffixes are appended to the demonstrative pronouns or the Sinhala nouns. For example, the suffix - ätto (his own) is attached to demonstrative pronouns such as ee (der / die / das) and mee (this / r / s). For other animate nouns, the suffix - läätto is added to the Sinhala noun. In the case of inanimate nouns, however, the noun is formed by combining the Sinhala adjective with a suffix: Noun = adjective + -pojja / -tana / -gejja / -rukula / -danda / -raacaa . Examples of this are the Vedda nouns for nose , eye and ear :
| Sin. noun | Sin. adjective | V. noun |
| Nose | naas (concerning the nose) | naaspojja (nose) |
| Uh (eye) | äs (concerning the eye) | äjjejja (eye) |
| Kana (ear) | kan (concerning the ear) | kanrukula (ear) |
Reduction and simplification
In contact languages there are often reductions and simplifications, and these can also be found in the Vedda:
Feminine and masculine forms (genera)
In contrast to Sinhala, the feminine form in Vedda only arises through a suffix change, the stem remains unchanged. The masculine suffix is -a / -aa and the feminine suffix -i / -ii . The phonetic length depends on the phonological structure of the word:
| Sinhala: | Mask: gonaa (bull) | Fem: eledena (cow) |
| Vedda: | Mask: gonaa (bull) | Fem: gonii (cow) |
| Sinhala: | Mask: kukka (dog) | Fem: kikki (bitch) |
| Vedda: | Mask: kukka (dog) | Fem: kukki (bitch) |
number
Another reduction in Vedda morphology is the loss of the distinction normally used in Sinhala number to distinguish between nouns and adverbials on the one hand and between animate and inanimate nouns on the other. Sinhala has the three numerical markings dennek , dekak and depaarak . Dennek is used for two people (nominal, animate), dekak for two objects (nominal, inanimate) and depaarak when something occurs twice (adverbials). The Vedda has simplified this and only needs dekamak for all three cases .
pronoun
There is a further reduction in the category of degrees in the pronouns of the second person in Sinhala. The Sinhala second person pronouns are structured according to a hierarchy (a) according to the status of the person being addressed and the person being addressed and (b) the attitude of the person being addressed towards the person being addressed: reverent - equal - lower - lowest and each of these categories has its own Pronouns. The Vedda, on the other hand, only have a single form for the second-person pronoun topan , which is used for every status and every attitude. The Vedda pronouns, unlike Sinhala, also have no number. The same form is used regardless of whether one means only one person or more than one person.
Negative forms
Another point of reduction in the Vedda concerns the replacement of various Sinhalese negative forms with a single form. While Sinhala has six negative forms ( Nää, epaa, bää, nemee, nättaṁ, bäri ), the Vedda has only one, namely koduy .
syntax
In terms of syntax, Vedda is similar to Sinhala, but there are a few noticeable differences. In Vedda, unlike Sinhala, when an indicative sentence is negated, the negative particle is attached to the infinitive. In comparison, in Sinhala, the negative particle is attached to the emphatic form of the verb. Furthermore, in Sinhalese all indicative clauses, whether negative or affirmative, have two tenses, the past and the non-past. In the Vedda, on the other hand, there is a three-part system of tenses with past, present and future, which is only used in affirmative clauses, but not in negative clauses.
literature
- De Silva, MW Sugathapala. 1972. Vedda Language of Ceylon: Texts and Lexicon. Munich: R. Kitzinger.
- Dharmadasa, KNO 1974. The Creolization of an Aboriginal Language: The Case of Vedda in Sri Lanka (Ceylon). Anthropological Linguistics 16 (2). 79-106.
- Gair, James W., Barbara C. Lust (ed.), Studies in South Asian Linguistics: Sinhala and Other South Asian Languages. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998. ISBN 0-19-509521-9
- Obeyesekere, Gananath. 2004. The Väddas: Representations of the Wild Man in Sri Lanka. In Jacob K. Olupona (ed.), Beyond Primitivism: Indigenous religious traditions and modernity. New York and London: Routledge.
- Uhl, Wolfgang Albin. 1994. Wedda: The native inhabitants of Sri Lanka - A journey into the stone age. Reutlingen: Oertel + Spörer.
- van Driem, George. 2001c. Languages of the Himalayas: An Ethnolinguistic Handbook of the Greater Himalayan Region, containing an Introduction to the Symbiotic Theory of Language. Vol. 1. Leiden: Brill.
- Wijesekera, Nandadeva. 1982. Vanishing Veddas. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Sri Lanka Branch, New Series 26.1-22.
Web links
- Ethnologue, accessed July 4, 2015