Some of the differences can be explained by the substrate influence of the parent stock of the Vedda language. He wrote the 377-page An anthology of Sinhalese literature up to 1815, selected by the UNESCO National Commission of Ceylon Substratum influence in Sinhala Īccording to Wilhelm Geiger, Sinhala has features that set it apart from other Indo-Aryan languages. During the career of Christopher Reynolds (1922-2015) as a Sinhalese lecturer at the SOAS, University of London, he extensively researched the Sinhalese language and its pre-1815 literature: the Sri Lankan government awarded him the Sri Lanka Ranjana medal for this. In 1815 the island of Ceylon came under British rule. the words mässā ("fly") and mäkkā ("flea"), which both correspond to Sanskrit makṣikā but stem from two regionally different Prakrit words macchiā and makkhikā (as in Pali). There are several cases of vocabulary doublets, e.g. An example of an Eastern feature is the ending -e for masculine nominative singular (instead of Western -o) in Sinhalese Prakrit. Sanskrit viṃśati "twenty", Sinhala visi-, Hindi bīs). Eastern Prakrit features Īn example for a Western feature in Sinhala is the retention of initial /v/ which developed into /b/ in the Eastern languages (e.g. vibāgaya "exam" Sinhalese Prakrit viṭṭa > Modern Sinhala viṭa)