Ancora sulla rilessificazione in Sinhala

Once More on Relexification in Sinhala · A modern Indo-Aryan language, Sin hala is one of the official languages of Sri Lanka together with Tamil and English. There are two alternative forms of it: formal and informal or, more precisely, written and spoken Sinhala. The existence of these two forms has produced diglossia. In the course of its history Sinhala came into contact with Sanskrit, Pāli, Tamil, Portuguese, Dutch, and English. When modern Sinhala is taken into account it is certainly English that has influenced the language of Sri Lanka more than the others. The author analyses a pecu liar usage of spoken Sinhala: the so-called “compound verb” construction, in which forms of the Sinhala verbs meaning ‘to do’ or ‘to be/become’ respectively combine with a noun or an adjective. Such construction is extended, so that these Sinhala verbs occur with non-integrated loanwords adopted from English. This phenomenon is interpreted as a case of rilexification.