Corpus Planning Situation of the Sinhalese Language in the Latter Part of the 20th Centu'1'; A Linguistic Study on Word Dividing Rules

Abstract

Corpus planning is involved with creating standard for a language such as spelling, grammar or creating dictionaries. It is a deliberate effort to influence the structure of the language. This study intends to analyse the word dividing rules of written Sinhalese. Data were collected from the written records published time to time by the government on word dividing rules in the latter part of the 20th century. Communication is the major function of language and the effective communication relies on words. The word is a single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing which may consist of a sound, a combination of sounds, a single morpheme or a combination of morphemes. When there were no word dividing rules, writers, publishers, teachers and students used to divide the words as they desire. It influenced badly on the standard of Sinhalese language. So, some experts in the Sinhalese language decided to introduce some rules for it. As the results of their discussions they decided to implement some acceptable word dividing rules in the written Sinhalese. Then they made some state documents including those rules. Those documents were revised from time to time and new documents were created. The major objective of this study is to comparatively analyse those documents and to forward a new proposal for the word dividing rules.