User:Suniti karunatillake/sandbox

Sisil Karunatillake Walimuni Devage (March 04 1938 - September 05 2012) was a polyglot, expert in South Asian religions, and a linguist on the origins of South Asian languages. He spent most of his career affiliated with the Department of Linguistics, the University of Kelaniya (formerly Vidyalankara University), Sri Lanka. His research collaborations in the USA centered at the Department of Linguistics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; and the Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, MA. Beginning with Karunatillake's PhD dissertation on "Historical Phonology of Sinhalese: from Old Indo-Aryan to the Fourteenth Century," his work generated diverse articles, books, reviews, language guides in Sinhala and Tamil, dictionaries, and encyclopedic reports. These garnered him national renown in Sri Lanka, including the Sahitya Ratna (i.e., outstanding contribution to the advancement of Sinhala literature), and the 17th Sarvodaya National Award (i.e., for national integration between the Sinhala and Tamil communities via university instruction, research on shared aspects of the two languages, and the Sinhala - Tamil dictionary). The Sidat Sangara: text, translation, and glossary (2013); and An Etyomological Lexicon of the Sinhala Language (2012) constitute two final, and major contributions by him.

Education[edit] Born in the village of Yagodamulla, Minuwangoda, Gampaha District, Sri Lanka, Karunatillake received his formal education from the Minuwangoda Central College. He completed his secondary education by achieving the highest score in the National Advanced Level Examination (A/L) in 1955, also highlighting the success of Sri Lanka's Central College High School system in enabling academic competitiveness in village settings. Karunatillake subsequently enrolled at the University of Peradeniya, specializing in Oriental (Pra:ci:na) Languages. He also achieved the second place at the national university entrance examination in 1956. True to this early demonstration of prowess in language studies, he achieved an Honors B. A. in Sanskrit, with a second class upper division in 1960.

Squyres was raised in the town of Wenonah in southern New Jersey.[4]

Squyres attended Gateway Regional High School in Woodbury Heights, New Jersey.[5] He received his B.A. in Geological Sciences from Cornell University in 1978[5][6] and his Ph.D. in Astronomy (Planetary Studies) from the same institution in 1981,[2][7] where he worked closely with Carl Sagan.[8] Squyres then spent five years as a postdoctoral associate and research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center before returning to Cornell as a faculty member. He received the H. C. Urey Prize from the Planetary Division of the American Astronomical Society in 1987. In 2007, he was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth and Environmental Science [2] by the Franklin Institute. He is also a member of the college fraternity Tau Kappa Epsilon (TKE).