Sinhala and Sri Lanka Online Forum

[pahan]

The Sinhala spoken language has the following characteristics:

* SOV (Subject Object Verb) word order.

* There are almost no subordinate clauses as in English, but only non-finite clauses that are formed by the means of participles and verbal adjectives. Example: "The man who writes books" translates to pot̪ liənə miniha, literally "books writing man".

* It is a left-branching language (see branching), which means that determining elements are usually put in front of what they determine (see example above).

* An exemption to this are statements of quantity which usually stand behind what they define. Example: "the four books" translates to pot hat̪ərə, literally "books four".

* There are no prepositions, only postpositions (see Adposition). Example: "under the book" translates to pot̪ə jaʈə, literally "book under".

* Sinhala is a Pro-drop language: The subject of a sentence can be omitted when it is redundant because of the context. Example: The sentence kohed̪ə gie, literally "where went", can mean "where did I/you/he/she/we... go". Also the copula "to be" is generally omitted: "I am rich" translates to mamə poːsat̪, literally "I rich".

* There is a four-way deictic system (which is rare): There are four demonstrative stems (see demonstrative pronouns) meː "here, close to the speaker", oː "there, close to the person addressed", arə "there, close to a third person, visible" and eː "there, close to a third person, not visible".

* The presence of so-called prenasalized stops. A very short homorganic nasal is added preceding a voiced stop, in which case the syllable remains monomoraic (see mora).

[JFonseka]

Lol, I can speak sinhalese, but if I had to learn my language in that way, I would never end up learning it, that is extremely confusing, best way to learn is to go to Sri Lanka and speak there