Christopher Reynolds

Christopher Hanby Baillie Reynolds (29 July 19223 April 2015) was the first British academic to study the Maldivian language. He wrote the first English-Maldivian dictionary: this complied with the Maldive Government's 1970's then Roman-transliteration scheme. The material was available to academics from the 1970s, and finally published in 432 pages with 5000 individual entries in 2003. The dictionary complemented his 1993 150-page Maldives (World Bibliographical Series number 158) book. During his career as a Sinhalese lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London he taught and extensively researched the Sinhalese language and its pre-1815 literature: the Sri Lankan government awarded him the Sri Lanka Ranajana medal for this. Education interrupted by war service Christopher Hanby Baillie Reynolds was born 29 July 1922 in St Albans, England; his father was the registrar of the Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy. Christopher's school education was at Winchester College. His Honour Mods studies including Modern Languages at New College, Oxford were interrupted in 1942 by World War II war service in Italy, taking him after the war (but still in the army) to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) where he was fascinated by the Sinhalese language, script and culture. After the war, with a Forlong scholarship, he gained a BA degree in Sinhalese at SOAS.