An Australian of Sri Lankan (Sinhalese) descent wrote to Ozwordsrecently raising the issue of related languages. He noticed the similarity between the Sinhalese word nama ‘name’ and the English word name and wondered whether the similarity were simply coincidental. It is not, of course. Sinhalese and English are related languages, a fact which may be a surprise to many. The language of the Beowulfpoet, of Chaucer and Shakespeare and Donne and Dickens and Dame Iris Murdoch, is, putting it loosely, cousin german to Sinhalese, a language spoken nowhere in the world except in the tiny island Sri Lanka.

In the Old English poem Beowulf(written about 1000 ad), the hero Beowulf introduces himself as follows: Beowulf is min nama (‘Beowulf is my name’). Had he been speaking modern Sinhalese, he would have said Magé nama Beowulf (‘My name Beowulf’—by the bye, my and magé are related as well). In Latin Beowulf would have used nomen for ‘name’; in classical Greek ónoma; in Sanskrit naman; in modern French nom; in modern German Name; in modern Italian nome; in modern Spanish nombre; in modern Swedish namn; in Old Frisian noma; in Old High German namo; in Gothic namô—this listing is becoming tedious, but there’s enough there to indicate the similarities. Why the similarities? Because all these languages are descended from a single hypothetical language, variously called Proto-Indo-European,Aryan,Indo-Germanic,etc., which is believed to have originated somewhere in northern India long before 2000 BC. Why ‘hypothetical’? Because not a trace of it exists.

Proto-Indo-European spawned a number of offspring. (Good going for a hypothetical language!) Among the oldest of these for which records exist is Sanskrit, the sacred language of Hinduism. Its earliest form was spoken in India from about c.1800 BC and it is still used in India as the language of religion and learning. One of its many descendants is Sinhalese, the native tongue of about three-quarters of the inhabitants of Sri Lanka.

Other descendants of Proto-Indo-European include Greek; Italic (which produced Latin which, in turn, produced the Romance languages, French, Italian, Spanish, etc.); West Germanic (which produced English, Dutch, and German); North Germanic (which produced the Scandinavian languages); Celtic; Baltic (which produced Lithuanian and Latvian); and Slavonic (which produced, in alphabetical order, Belorussian, Bulgarian, Czech, Macedonian, Polish, Serbo-Croat, Slovak, Slovene, Russian, and Ukrainian).

Testing. Sanskrit matr, Sinhalese matha, Old Irish mathir, Greek meter, Latin mater, French mère, Italian and Spanish madre, Old English modor, modern English mother, German Mutter, Dutch moeder, Swedish and Danish moder, Old Slavonic mati.

Testing father is a bit more difficult because the German philologist Jakob Grimm (he of fairytale fame) went and invented a law called, naturally enough, ‘Grimm’s law’ just to complicate matters. Because of Grimm we must bear in mind that while conservative languages such as Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin staidly minded their ps and qs (forget about the qs, they are a red herring), the larrikin Germanic languages changed almost every p they could get their hands on, and then they went on to change ks and ds. And so they turned their ps into fs, their ks into hs, their ds into ts, und so weiter.Bearing this in mind, let’s test father: Sanskrit pitr, Sinhalese pitha, Greek pater, Latin pater, French père, Italian and Spanish padre; (now for some grim ones) Old English fæder, German Vater (they changed the original p sound to an f, but did they use an F? Not on your nelly!—they used a V and pretended that it made an effish sound), Old Frisian feder, Dutch vader, Old High German fater, Old Norse father, Modern Swedish and Danish fader, Old Irish athir.

To Grimm it a bit further, let us look at the Latin word dens (dent-). In Greek it is odous (odont-). In Sanskrit it is dan, danta. In Lithuanian dantìs. In Old Irish dét (*dent). In Sinhalese datha (plural dath). Sinhalese has lost the nasal sound in the middle of the word and so has the Old Irish (*dent being the hypothetical ancestor of dét). In French dent. In Italian dente. In Spanish diente. Now for the Germanic languages: Old English toth (plural teth), Old Frisian tôth, Middle Dutch tant, Modern Dutch tand, Old High German zana, Modern German Zahn (pronounced /tsahn/), Modern Swedish and Danish tand. Grimm’s Law, by the bye, enables us to see at a glance that dentistand dental,for example, are late borrowings into the language (earliest citations 1759 and 1599 respectively). Had these words not been borrowed, you would be visiting your toothist tomorrow to have an impression of your mouth taken and sent to a toothal technician for the crafting of your new false teef.

Sinhalese culture, literature, architecture, and the arts were flourishing from the 3rd century bc, a time when the Brits were running around dressed in nothing but woad and goose-bumps. When the Brits conquered Sri Lanka in 1815, they were probably culturally inclined to look down their noses at the dark-skinned ‘savages’ they had subdued. None of the Brits would have had the faintest inkling that the language they spoke was almost cousin german to the ‘gibberish’ the natives were speaking. Take the English word queen, for instance. It goes back in time to the Old English cwen, and cwen is related to the Sinhalese word gani. But queen is a woman who rules in her own right or is the wife of a king—you can’t get more top-of-the-ladderish than that—whereas gani means ‘woman’ with pejorative undertones, almost akin to ‘slut’. The Sinhalese gani comes from the Sanskrit ganika ‘female whore’. It is a cognate of the Greek gyne (gynaik-), a neutral word meaning ‘woman’, from which we get such recent English borrowings as ‘gynaecology’. Gani and queen—sisters under the skin! The Sinhalese gani, of course, is also related to the English word quean which the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionarydefines as ‘a bold, impudent, or ill-behaved woman ... a harlot, strumpet’. And so in Langland’s Piers Plowman(1393) we have At churche in the charnel cheorles aren vuel to knowe ... other a queyne fro a queene(‘At church in the charnel-house it is difficult to distinguish a churl from a churl ... or a quean from a queen’). I am ‘richt laith’ to point this moral at modern royals.

By the bye, the small township of Baddaginnie in Victoria (between Benalla and Violet Town) doesn’t derive its name from an Aboriginal language. It comes straight from the Sinhalese word badagini meaning ‘hunger’ (bada ‘belly’ + gini ‘fire’). I thought I’d throw that in to acknowledge the small contribution Sinhalese has made to the Aussie language.