Word: sinhala
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...back to Washington for a state dinner for Sri Lanka's President, Junius Jayawardene (entertainment by Frank Sinatra), and a ceremonial trunk-shake with an 18-month-old baby elephant, a gift from Jayawardene. Reagan was told that the elephant's name was Jayathu, which in Sinhala means victory. Said Reagan: "In view of her name, I appreciate your fine sense of timing...
...Roman Catholic schools, refused to issue building permits for any more. Climaxing a long campaign against the English-speaking government elite and the Tamil-speaking Hindu minority (almost one-quarter of Ceylon's 10.6 million people), Mrs. Bandaranaike ordered that all official business must be conducted in Sinhala, the language of the Buddhist majority...
...Tamil Federal Party declared a day of mourning. Hundreds of registered letters piled up in post offices because registry slips were addressed in English. Some 2,300 civil servants quit without waiting for the switch to Sinhala to become official; remaining bureaucrats are already evading the language decree by circulating memos in English with the notation in the margin: "Sinhala version to follow." It rarely does...
...power than religion. In 1956, when Bandaranaike was running for election, Buddharakitha organized the United Monks' Front, which went scuttling off to the hustings to recommend Banda and his Freedom Party, on the grounds that Banda promised to give Buddhism its "rightful place" in Ceylon and to make Sinhala, the tongue spoken by most Ceylonese Buddhists, the official language of the land...
...million Ceylonese Tamils, who migrated from the Indian mainland as long as two millennia ago, but who still speak their own language and practice the Hindu religion, were in a state of near rebellion over the government's proclamation of Sinhala, the language spoken by the 6,750,000-strong Buddhist majority, as the official tongue of the land. Although the controversial "Sinhala Only" law was passed in 1956 under the administration of the late Prime Minister Solomon West Ridgeway Bias Bandaranaike, it was his energetic widow Sirimavo who first set out to enforce it early this year...