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The period commencing in the 8th Century AD and ending in the middle of the 13th Century is treated as the mediaeval Sinhalese age. During this age, many of the features of the modern Sinhalese language sprang up and evolved satisfactorily. The declension of nouns and case endings are very similar to that in modern Sinhalese. In this period, a number of clear and somewhat mature characteristics appeared, even in the combination of sentences, and the subject-predicate relation was established for the first time. With the maturity of some of the emerging features, as referred to above, Sinhalese acquired some erudite styles in the 9th Century AD. Sinhalese dispensed with its Prakrit forms entirely. In this history, we see that Sinhalese became a language capable of expressing any thoughts with clarity and lucidity.
As discussed above, we come across a language with features similar to those in modern Sinhalese prose language for the first time in the 8th and 9th Centuries AD. The development of the Sinhalese language, which had been taking place at a slow pace until the 10th Century AD, began to change rapidly and therefore freed itself completely from the Prakrit form that it possessed up until then. During the period of the 8th, 9th, and 10th Centuries, we are able to identify the features of a stabilized Sinhalese language. Instead of the Prakrit language form, during this time, the Sinhalese language exhibits basic features which indicate that it has gradually developed.
During this period, the rock inscriptions, which had previously been brief, began to grow in size and number. At the same time, major differences were shown between the languages of the ancient and the medieval periods. Since spoken language changes more rapidly than written language, language specialists are of the opinion that there was a big change in the Sinhalese language during the medieval period. |
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