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Interestingly enough, both the names are Tamil who form the minority population in Sri Lanka, not from the Sinhalese majority. Under British rule, a large part
by sfifs 5y ago
Interestingly enough, both the names are Tamil who form the minority population in Sri Lanka, not from the Sinhalese majority.
Under British rule, a large part of the administration and educated class came from this community who were favoured by the British as part of their divide and rule policy and I'm sure the effects carried on at least 1-2 generations beyond independence.
The Sri Lankan civil war resulted largely from of reversing this policy in the opposite direction after independence.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> both the names are Tamil I notice in the wikipedia page on "Tamil language" that it says this: > Unlike most Indian languages, Tamil does not distinguish aspirated and unaspirated consonants. If that's true, why do the Tamil names Chandrasekhar and Thirugnanasampanthamoorthy use the digraphs "th" and "kh"? What sounds do those represent, and how would they be different if they were spelled "t" and "k"? The best guess I've been able to come up with is "Tamil shares a writing system with one or more other Indian languages that do distinguish aspirated consonants, and it just happens to spell these names with the aspirated version of the consonant", but I know literally nothing about this.
- sfifs 5y agothe Tamil written script indeed doesn't distinguish th and t or kh and k and indeed more sounds. However when they are spoken, especially by the more educated folks, they are pronounced differently from contextual knowledge. the contextual knowledge in this case is that both these names are actually from Sanskrit. When you write Sanskrit in Devnagari script, it does indeed distinguish and so the educated folks will pronounce it correctly being aware of this.
- thaumasiotes 5y agoWhat's the giveaway that these names are Tamil and not Bangla or Hindi or whatnot?