A descriptive grammar of Sinhala by the German Orientalist Wilhelm Geiger, first published in Colombo by the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. It is the foundational modern descriptive grammar of the language, and it is still cited in linguistic scholarship. The copy offered here is a later reprint issued by Godage International Publishers, not the original Royal Asiatic Society printing.
Please note that the text of this edition is in Sinhala, not English. International buyers who do not read Sinhala script should take that into account before ordering.
Geiger worked in Indo-Iranian languages and in the history of Iran and of Sri Lanka. He was a specialist in Pali, Sinhala and Dhivehi, and he made the English translation of the Mahavamsa by which that chronicle is most widely read outside Sri Lanka. His grammar of Sinhala belongs to that body of work: a European philologist's systematic description of a language he had studied alongside its Pali and Prakrit relations, produced under the imprint of the learned society then at the centre of Oriental studies in Colombo.
The grammar has held its place for a long time. Later linguists working on Sinhala have continued to refer back to it, which is the plainest measure of what it achieved — a description durable enough to remain a reference point rather than a historical curiosity. That is why it continues to be reprinted, and why students and scholars still look for a copy.
This will interest readers working seriously on Sinhala: students of linguistics, teachers of the language, those approaching Sinhala from Pali or from the Indo-Aryan languages of the subcontinent, and anyone tracing the history of philology in Ceylon. Readers wanting a conversational phrasebook or a beginner's course should look elsewhere; this is a grammar in the technical sense, written by a philologist for people who want the structure of the language set out.
Godage International Publishers is an established Colombo house publishing in Sinhala and English, and much of what it keeps in print consists of Sri Lankan scholarship and reference work of exactly this kind — titles that would otherwise be difficult to obtain outside the island.
- Author: Prof. Wilhelm Geiger
- Publisher: Godage International Publishers
- Language: Sinhala
- Pages: 200
- ISBN: 9789553040541
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