The Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole Manuscript is a significant record of the Indo-Portuguese

Sri Lanka Indo-Portuguese language

Sri Lanka Indo-Portuguese,Ceylonese Portuguese Creole or Sri Lankan Portuguese Creole is a language spoken in Sri Lanka. While the predominant languages of the island are Sinhala and Tamil, the interaction of the Portuguese and the Sri Lankans led to the evolution of a new language, Sri Lanka...

 creole

Creole language

A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...

, as spoken in the 19th century among the Burgher

Burgher people

The Burghers are a Eurasian ethnic group, historically from Sri Lanka, consisting for the most part of male-line descendants of European colonists from the 16th to 20th centuries and local women, with some minorities of Swedish, Norwegian, French and Irish.Today the mother tongue of the Burghers...

 and Kaffir

Sri Lanka Kaffir people

The Sri Lankan Kaffirs are an ethnic group in Sri Lanka who are partially descended from 16th century Portuguese traders and the African slaves who were brought by them to work as labourers and soldiers to fight against the Sri Lankan kings...

 communities. It a precious source for linguistic

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

, literary

Literature

Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...

, anthropological

Anthropology

Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...

, and folkloric

Folklore

Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...

 studies.

The manuscript was collected by Hugh Nevill

Hugh Nevill

Hugh Nevill was a British civil servant, best known for his scholarship and studies of the culture of Sri Lanka.-Biography:Nevill went to Sri Lanka in 1865, as a Private Secretary to the Chief Justice. From 1869 to 1897 he followed a career in the British Civil Service, which led to his...

 in the period 1865–1897, and is now at the British Library

British Library

The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom, and is the world's largest library in terms of total number of items. The library is a major research library, holding over 150 million items from every country in the world, in virtually all known languages and in many formats,...

.

The manuscript contains 1,049 quatrains, divided into three sections:

• Portuguese Song Batticaloa (Burgher)
• Songs of the Portuguese Kaffrinha (Kaffir)
• The Story of Orson and Valentine

The story of Orson and Valentine was very popular in Europe. Variants of the story are found in 5th century Pali

Pali language

Pāli is a Middle Indo-Aryan language of the Indian subcontinent. It is best known as the language of many of the earliest extant Buddhist scriptures, as collected in the Pāi Canon or Tipitaka, and as the liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism.-Etymology of the name:The word Pali itself...

 literature, and it is also an early play of Sinhalese theatre (Balasanta Nadagama).

The manuscript is written using a mix of Portuguese

Portuguese language

Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...

 and Dutch

Dutch language

Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...

 orthography

Orthography

The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...

.

External links

• Complete downloadable book teaching the basics of Sri Lanka Indo-Portuguese
• Sri Lanka Portuguese Creoles from a Sri Lanka virtual library site.