On the threshing floor, Sri Lankan paddy farmers do not speak as they do elsewhere. The work has its own vocabulary — a register used out of respect for cultivation itself — and it is known as kamath bhashawa, the language of the threshing floor. That speech is the subject of this book.
Piyasena Kahandagamage writes about a form of language that has been slipping away. As machinery entered paddy cultivation and the old sequence of work changed around it, the occasions for using this vocabulary thinned out, and much of it has already passed out of ordinary social use. The book sets down what that language was and how it belonged to the work it accompanied.
The text is in Sinhala throughout, published by M. D. Gunasena & Co. of Colombo. Readers who do not read Sinhala will not be able to use it; for those who do, it will be of interest to anyone concerned with rural speech, agricultural tradition and the vocabulary that disappears when a way of working changes.
- Author: Piyasena Kahandagamage
- Publisher: M. D. Gunasena & Co. (Pvt) Ltd
- Language: Sinhala
- ISBN: 9789552111112
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