In the title of my paper the stress is to be laid upon the word ‘etymological.’ The vocabulary does not contain all the Māldivian words which I collected during the last five or six years, either from printed books, or from manuscripts hitherto unpublished, or from the lips of Māldivian natives. For it was by no means my intention to compile a Māldivian dictionary for practical use: this would be premature; it may perhaps be done at some future time. For the present my purpose is purely philological. The present object is to publish linguistic materials which may serve as a basis for a scientific phonology of the Māldivian language. My vocabulary is, therefore, both an introduction and a supplement to the third part of my “Māldivian Studies,” which deals with that subject. First, I have excluded, of course, from my vocabulary the numerous words borrowed from Arabic, Persian, and Hindustani, as they do not belong to the original stock of the Māldivian dialect. But I have omitted also generally those words which cannot be explained in a satisfactory way by the help of phonetic laws confirmed by other etymologies which are not open to doubt. There remains, nevertheless, a sufficient number of words to show clearly the character of the Māldivian language. It is merely a dialect, and not even a very ancient dialect, of Sinhalese. This result is, I think, also of historical interest; for it appears from it that the Māldive islands were occupied by Sinhalese people, but hardly at an earlier period than about eight or nine centuries ago.
