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English and Latin SinhalaC. Wijeyawickrema, USAIn writing about the "superiority of English" Wilfred Fernando (WF) stated that "people in Sri Lanka oppose using English for commercial and other purposes as well as on the international stage because the Japanese and the Chinese do not use English for such purposes" (Island, 8/18/2008). This statement has two big errors. In the first place, China and Japan use lot of English for trade and commerce. There was a time when the "buyers" learned Chinese and Japanese to do business with China and Japan, and Chinese and Japanese businesses hired English interpreters or employed Americans as their agents. This happens rarely now unless an American or a European is hired as part of business strategy. Secondly, no sane person will suggest using Sinhala in international transactions because no "foreign transaction" is possible in Sinhala. Maliban mudalali could not sell his biscuits in India in Sinhala! We know what had happened to the Pre-Poya and Poya weekend holiday arrangement during the UNP-FP national government days. Offices in other countries were not open on Sundays for business transactions from Colombo! Of about 2,700 languages in the world Sinhala is facing extinction (only about 16 million people use it) in a world of about six billion people. When WF said that "English is superior to other languages," I presume what he meant was its wider geographic distribution-availability of English users in so many locations in the world. The word superior is a bad choice because the opposite of it is inferior. If Ajantha Mendis was bothered by his lack of "superior" English he could have become an "inferior" soldier or cricketer. Due to the historical fact that the former British Empire encompassed a vast geographic area and the subsequent economic and military super power status of USA, the use of English is more prevalent in more locations than the other languages of former colonial masters. According to the Cambridge encyclopedia of the English Language (David Crystal, 1995, pp. 108-9) there were 75 geographic territories using English. English is a very economical language. It has a rich vocabulary, flexible and easy to use. If a standard western typewriter keyboard were to expand to take in every Chinese ideograph it would have to be about 15 feet long and 5 feet wide (The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, Bill Bryson, 1990, pp. 113-118). Since the purpose of language is to communicate human thought, the mother tongue of a person is always the superior language because it stimulates the brain. Any other language is merchandise like the tooth brush or the X-ray machine. In this sense English is a more popular commodity. We can use it and we can discard it. It is sad that some Sinhala people have not realized this truth even after 200 years of failure of English to deliver development (progress?). The colonial master used his mother tongue to exploit Ceylon and after 1948 his Colombo servant class used it to maintain the status quo. By 1956 Ceylon was facing economic and social hardships-the English-using ruling class could not think of national development. They mismanaged. The fact that English as a language has no magic powers is clear from what we see in countries where it is the mother tongue. USA, UK, Canada and Australia are full of social and economic problems. They have both general poverty as well as pockets of extreme poverty and misery. Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans revealed this weak side of USA just like the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown exposed the callous approach to human welfare and health of the then USSR. The mother tongue of people is however the best way to educate children so that they become adults with creativity, critical thinking and communication skills enhanced. With such foundation any other language they learn becomes one more tool in their box of daily living. After 1956 we found rejuvenation (renaissance) in creativity in people who studied in Sinhala (or Tamil). In the 1970s I have witnessed this in government offices, research labs, universities, schools, cinema and drama, factories, in agriculture, in native medicine etc. Often, those who were innovative, who thought outside the box and experimented with new ideas and products faced obstruction and discouragement. Their bosses (including professors who were department heads) operated within an English-educated frame of mind. Most of those who supported the JVP insurrection in 1971 came from this category of frustrated employees/students. I can remember how the Ayurvedic Medical Research Institute at Navinna had a chemistry Ph.D. professor as its head while the work was actually carried out by two native physicians who had to be deputy principals because they could not speak in English. It should have been the other way around where the chemist undertakes chemical analyses under the directions of the native physicians. The MBBS doctor who had several London-based qualifications (LRCP, FRCS) treated me when I was sick, but when he became old and sick he went to a native physician for help. English is a useful tool but it should never be a used as a "qualifying gate" to enter into higher education institutions or to get a public sector job in a society where most people do not get an opportunity or access to learn English. A person who thinks his or her mother tongue is superior handles English or any other language advantageously in a more creative fashion. He or she compares languages and derives benefits from differences found in other languages. When faced with language-related problems they try to find out solutions. This cannot happen with people who try to learn a foreign language thinking it is "superior" and neglect their own when faced with a challenge they will feel "embarrassed" about the status of their mother tongue. I can give the readers an example of creative work done by a person who felt that his mother tongue, Sinhala, was superior to any other language on earth. Faced with the challenge of how to make computers Sinhala-friendly this person who lives in USA single-handedly developed what is called Latin Sinhala-writing Sinhala using Latin letters. His task became easier because the Sinhala alphabet (Hodiya) is a system of sounds and "letter symbols" unlike letters in English or in Latin alphabets. For example, in English the letter U is in ‘put' and ‘but' with two different sounds. In Sinhala each Hodiya akshara (akura) has a unique sound. Because of this he was able to develop a set of smart fonts so that when I type my last name the way it sounds (Vijayavikrama) using the regular English computer key board (QWERTY), I see it in Sinhala script on the computer screen. I use this method now to type all my Sinhala manuscripts and to send my e-mails in Sinhala. Since Sinhala is written using Latin letters it generates two scripts, Sinhala and Latin. Because of this underlying Latin base Latin Sinhala can also be called dual-script Sinhala. This Latin base allowed the Sinhala language to join the club of European languages as its 15th member! With electricity (electromagnetic medium) replacing paper as the medium of writing and storing data (filing cabinets versus removable disks of the size of a finger) early in the beginning of the new digital revolution, fourteen European languages including Icelandic formulated an internet's Brahmin club placing them at the front end of the Unicode (Latin-1). The club uses Latin letters, and Latin Sinhala, in addition to the English letters, borrowed three other letters from the Old English to represent three sounds (tha sound as in tanakola-grass; ae sound as in anaya-nail; edth sound as in dadaya, skin rash) (in addition to these three sounds in the Old English, two other letter symbols were borrowed from French/Spanish and Danish, respectively). The difference between Unicode Latin-1 user group and the rest of the countries using Unicode (Sri Lanka and other non-European countries) is that Latin-1 group use single byte on the digital highway while the others use dual byte. This is like using two or three words instead of one word. In the case of China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam Unicode had to accept a four-byte solution claimed by them. Thailand insisted that it wants single byte for Thai letters. Sri Lanka government accepted the two-byte solution which ends up on the digital highway as three bytes. Latin Sinhala has the following advantages: It is global in coverage- an e-mail in Sinhala is possible between
any two places on earth (Unicode Sinhala with dual-byte is only for
local use);
C. Wijeyawickrema, USA
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