Vijaya: Encyclopedia - Vijaya

Vijaya

There is a story about Vijaya and his men landing on the shores of Sri-Lanka. There were no women with them, since they were exciled by the king father of Vijeya. So, he married a local tribal woman and then a Chola princess in order to have a son. But there was no reference that he was a Sinhalese or he spoke Sinhala. Therefore it is wrong to say, Vijeya introduced Sinhala to Sri-Lanka. If he was a Sinhala, who was exciled ( or rather left to drift in the bay of Bengal ), what happened to the rest of the Sinhala people who exciled him by putting them in a boat to drift, hopefully to his death ?. So, the only conclusion here is the Sinhala language was contructed out of Sanskrit and Pali, just like Creole and pegeon English from French and English respectively. This early Sinhala grew into a more established language by the efforts of Budhist scholars. Later of course it has further developed to become the present day Sinhala.

My main argument here is Vijeya did not bring Sinhala to Sri-Lanka. He very soon married a Tamil princess...and there is every reason to believe Tamil already got rooted in Sri-Lanka, even before Sinhala came to Sri-Lanka by other means.

Having critisized the origin of Sinhala in Sri-Lanka, it is important to note, that Sinhala made great progress into a literary language in Sri-Lanka ...during the past centuries to reach the current mature status. Let us hope it makes further strides based on a genuine history, instead of some other imaginative history.

By the way, Waatha and Watha have the same meaning in Tamil as those words have the same Sanskrit roots.

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Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Vijaya", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki