Contrastive Study on Spoken Tamil and the Spoken Sinhala Case Markers

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to give a brief introduction of the case markers of Sinhala and Tamil and it is specially focused on the areas of difficulty that the SriLankan Tamil speakers will have in learning Sinhala case markers. Case markers are the basic units in Language, which combine words while making a meaningful sentence. Those who don't have a clear knowledge on case inflexion may fail to write/ speak a language fluently. As Sinhala and Tamil belong to two different language families a vast difference could be noticed while using the case markers. Speakers of Tamil language often make mistakes, specially on dative marker 'ta' , referential ease marker 'gen 'langa', instrumental case marker 'nisa, 'ta' 'en' and sociative case marker 'ekka' etc. The sociative case marker for instance The sociative case marker is 'ooTay 'in spoken Tamil, where as in spoken Sinhala it is 'ekka' Eg: AmmavooTay varjgo Amma ekka enna (come with mother) PalatooTay varjgo A Tamil speaker may translate this sentence into Sinhala as, Palaturut ekka enna instead of palaturu aran enna. To overcome this problem we have to explain the similarities and the differences between these two languages. 1. Sinhala nouns are categorized as Animate Vs Inanimate 2. Tamil nouns are categorized as Human Vs Non human In this paper the case markers used in spoken Tamil are being compared with the case markers of standard spoken Sinhala. It is believed that it would help to understand the difficulty that Tamil students face while forming a Sinhala Sentence.