IDENTIFYING THE RELATION BETWEEN SINHALESE AND SANSKRIT

RASK, RASMUS.

Singalesisk Skriftlære.

Kolombo (Colombo, Sri Lanka), 1821. 8vo. Original blank blue wrappers. Some brownspotting (due to the paper quality). (2),16 pp.

First (and only) edition of the first Singalese grammar in a Western language, Rask's highly importent work, in which he "identified Sinhalese as a speech belonging to the same class as Sanskrit and added that Tamil belonged to quite a different class. Since then the subject has been studied and discusses by various scholars, and it is established beyond doubt that Sinhalese is an Indo-Aryan language."

Rasmus Rask is one of the absolutely most prominent and famous Danish philologers and is very well esteemed worldwide. He was the first to systematically study the ancient Nordic languages and is the discoverer of the relations between the consonants in the Indo-European languages. This discovery served as the foundation of the rules Jacob Grimm later formulated, underlying the Germanic and High-German soundshifts. In PMM, Rask is identified as "one of the founders of the modern science of language." (PMM 266).

Order-nr.: 52472