iberiul-kavkasiuri enaTmecniereba XXXIX

Tavazianobis etiketi da mesame piris nacvalsaxelTa sistema
Pronoun tamusē belongs to the literary lexical fund of Sinhala language. It
expresses politeness in literary language and means “your honors”(Gunasekera
1892:162) but in modern colloquial register of Spoken Sinhala it has an offensive
meaning. Moreover, using this form causes a reason for encouraging an addressee to
incline for fight can be caused. It has quite unprintable meaning and is used only in
addressing lower socio class. This example reminds us an addressing form
“vazhbatono” in Georgian, which nowadays has an offensive meaning, while its female
counterpart ”kalbatono” could maintain its polite meaning in modern using. But in
Georgian we don’t have such a rigorously distinguished system of social diversity which
is expressed in Sinhala language by using appropriate forms.
For addressing higher socio status or rank representative obətumā (ā male marker
) and obətumī (ī female marker) are used. These forms are composed by : obə (the 2nd
personal pronoun with very polite meaning, used only in Literary language) + tum
which is a special element for expressing a politeness, it can be added to the 3rd person
pronouns too, like: etuma, metuma ( he-polite form) also to a proper nouns, like
Jayətiləkətumā (=his honors Mr. Jayatilaka) .
In addressing high religious persons, such as Buddhist monks obəvahansē is
used. It is formed as follows: obə ( polite “you”) +vahansā; Literary: vahan “sandals”,
shoes, cf. Pali : upāhanā cf. Sanskrit: upāhansē > sey ”manner” (Geiger 1938: 32;17 )
Why did above discussed subject become the focus of our special interest?
We paid our attention to the existence of the different forms which denote the
2nd personal pronouns in the dictionary. But their using opportunities were not
systematically described in that special literature which has been available for us at
present. Of course, it is not beyond any doubt that several scholars had done a really
significant work in studying pronouns (Geiger, Gunasekera) but our interest was
focused on modern language situation.
Also, there is another important reason due to the benefit of learners of Sinhala.
Anyone who will depend only on the dictionary and takes an arbitrary choice of the
2nd personal pronoun forms, will face to an awkward situation. It is not reasonable to
use different forms without knowing etiquette.
Thus, this work is supposed to give some help for those who learn Sinhala and
are eager to communicate properly . We think, this article could be also useful for
those, who like to prepare translations into Sinhala and finally, it is helpful as a material
for studying some socio linguistic issues. It is noteworthy that except these 2nd
personal pronouns, the 3rd personal pronouns are specified in Sinhala according to
their numerous numbers and semantic-functional diversity as well and they interestingly
show how the society is socially distinguished or differentiated through the social
status or ranks. This will be the subject of our next study.
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