Does anyone have comments? It was news to me, I would have guessed
sinhalese and tamil would be closer. Does this have anything to do
with the spread of buddhism in Lanka thru Nagarjuna and his writings?
Please post follow-ups on SCIT and/or TELUSA.
--sreenivas-- dsr@vnet.ibm.com
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From: Priyantha Wijesinghe <VHWBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU>
Newsgroups: soc.culture.indian.telugu,soc.culture.sri-lanka
Subject: Telugu & Sinhalese script similarities
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 1996 02:08:09 EST
Organization: City University of New York/University Computer Center
Disclaimer: Author bears full responsibility for this post
Today I came across some samples of written Bengali, Gujarati, Sinhalese,
Tamil, Telugu and Urdu and was quite surprised to see how similar the
Sinhalese and Telugu scripts were. In fact, I think it is possible
for someone who is familiar with Sinhalese to recognise quite a number
of equivalent/homologous letters in the Telugu writing even without
any knowledge of that language; the resemblance is quite remarkable.
I would be very interested to know if this similarity between Sinhalese
and Telugu script is well known and, if so, what explanations are
generally given for this. Also, how would one go about analysing such
similarity in order to produce a 'phylogeny' or branching diagram of
relationship? I am thinking here only of the script resemblances, not
anthropological and other relationships between the Sinhalese and Telugu
ethnic groups, though the latter would also be interesting if it can
illuminate the similarities between the two scripts.
Purely intuitively, based on the samples of scripts before me, I would
suggest the following pattern of relationship for these languages:
Sinhalese-----------|
|-------|
Telugu--------------| |
|------|
Bengali-------------| | |
| | |
Tamil---------------|-------| |
| |
Gujarati------------| |
|
Urdu-------------------------------|
Does this make any sense? It would be nice to hear from some experts.
Priyantha Wijesinghe
New York, NY
vhwbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu
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