Ko? ~ Malinda Words

This is said to have happened almost a century ago. Maybe even before that. The month and year I do not know and it doesn’t really matter.

There was a man, reasonably wealthy with probably extensive properties, who belonged to a highly respected family. Suffice to say that he was the Lord of the Manor, the ‘Walawwe Hamu.’ Every few months or so he would order those who worked for him to pack his cart with all kinds of goodies. Then he would leave and would not return for a few weeks.

It was assumed that he had another family elsewhere as was quite common in those days. Some people would have known the details and others would have assumed. No one questioned because, after all, he was the Walawwe Hamu and of course because it was not entirely out of order.

Time passed.

One day a young man arrived. He was a stranger. He walked straight to the house, stepped into the verandah and there he encountered the lady of the house. There had been no sign of any respect or deference, not in word or in gesture. No greeting either. Just a query.

‘Ko?’

That would be ‘where?’

Where what? Where who? These questions were not asked by the lady. She did not ask who he was and what his business was. She turned around and went into the house. And in the following manner, informed her husband.

‘Anna aava. Gama dunnath nama denna baehae.’

Essentially: ‘There [he] has come; you could give him all your wealth but you cannot give him your name.’

The lady had put two and two together. Rather, two and two and two together and arrived at ‘six.’ She figured that a young man who was a total stranger, to have the gumption to walk into the house, show her no respect, offer no greeting and ask a question without a backstory and devoid of any detail whatsoever, had to have some kind of authority. The only kind that was relevant was a claim related to the Walawwe Hamu. It had to be a son. This explains, also, the conditions she imposed on her husband.

Apparently, the custom was that a man had every right to bequeath his entire wealth or part thereof to any son, recognized or not, ‘legitimate’ or not. However, he could give his name only to a child from a woman who belonged to the same caste, regardless of whether or not she was wealth, had some social standing or status.

I don’t how the properties were divided, but I was told that the name had in fact been given to the young man in accordance with what custom permitted.

One cannot draw broad conclusions about the prevalent social order based on this story. That’s for sociologists, anthropologists and historians to investigate. What’s important is the power of the Sinhala language.

Ko. It’s a single word. Ko? A single-word question. The context has to be obtained by a consideration of much that has transpired, the unwritten and yet adhered to norms of a particular social and cultural moment and the authority of the voice as evidenced by the sheer brevity of communication.

Ko? It’s a single word. In fact it’s a single syllable!

A language has to be extremely powerful and precise for such kinds of communication. Maybe part of the story lies in the voluminous nature of the Sinhala dictionary. The words starting with the ‘ka’ sound (ka, aka, ki, kee, ku, koo, ko, koa etc) alone make a collection more extensive than the Oxford Dictionary. When you have so many words at your disposal, you can say the same thing in numerous ways. You can say things with better clarity, confident in the knowledge that the listener is unlikely to misinterpret.

But, ‘ko?’ still amazes me, more than thirty years after I heard the above story for the first time. Ko: there’s a sociological treatise embedded in this word, this syllable. And we are not even talking about the variations of meaning that can be conveyed through varying the drag on the word, the use of inflection, the gravity of the tone or the accompanying facial expressions.

Ko? An invitation to examine. the Sinhala language, Sinhala customs, culture and how they’ve evolved, what has changed and what persists. Pretty neat, I think.

13 May 2023

Ko?

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is a new series. Links to previous articles in this new series are given below]

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