Alphabet Key To History Of Mankind

Author(s): David Diringer
Publisher: Hutchinsons Scientific and Technical Publications

Page 390

INDIAN BRANCH
389
This early writing, on the whole, resembles that of the Asoka northern inscriptions. As in Asoka, there are no duplicated consonants and no compound letters, while there appears the cerebral 1, which until about thirty-five years ago was supposed to be a very rare letter in the northern pre-Gupta inscriptions. It is now known that it formed part of the Brahmi character from the very beginning. (See H. Lueders, The Lingual la in the Northern Brahmi Script, "JOURN. OF THE ROY. ASIAT. SOCIETY," 1911; and also his article in Antidoron presented to Wackernagel, 1924: information by Professor H. W. Bailey, who also informs me that the cerebral la occurs quite often in the Asoka inscriptions).
On the other hand, unlike the Asoka northern inscriptions, there appear the aspirated consonants, the letter j (represented later by the Indian form for the aspirated jh), and long vowels appear occasionally in the earliest inscriptions, but not in those of the first century B.C. The long initial i replaces the form of the short i; there appear special forms of m (in the shape of a deep cup with a central horizontal cross bar) and of s (the trifid form). At the end of the first century B.C., the local development of the script seems to have been already complete.
Proto-Sinhalese
The so-called Proto-Sinhalese period may be dated from the fourth or fifth century A.D. to about the eighth century. There are few inscriptions extant belonging to this period, and only some of them have been published. That of Tonigala, belonging probably to the fourth century A.D., seems to be the earliest inscription of this period. Its writing does not differ very much from that of the former period. On the other hand, the inscriptions of the next period are so radically different, linguistically and graphically, that the difference looks nearly like a break. A reasonable explanation may be that in the course of the first millennium of the national existence, the daily-life speech gradually developed stylistically, phraseologically and grammatically, whilst a new type of writing, derived from the Grantha (see p. 381 f.), which came into use for the purposes of daily life, was also later employed for official inscriptions.
Mediaeval Sinhalese
The inscription of Gärandigala, attributed to the first half of the eighth century A.D., may be considered as the oldest extant mediaval Sinhalese inscription. The inscriptions of the ninth and tenth centuries are very numerous, and some of them are very extensive. The epigraphs of the eleventh century are rare, perhaps because a flourishing literary activity began in the ninth century. The mediaval Sinhalese script, which as mentioned is based on the Grantha character, developed into the modern Sinhalese character..