Sinhala

Sinhala or Sinhalese may refer to:

Sinhala (Unicode block)

Sinhala is a Unicode block containing characters for the Sinhala and Pali languages of Sri Lanka, and is also used for writing Sanskrit in Sri Lanka. The Sinhala allocation is loosely based on the ISCII standard, except that Sinhala contains extra prenasalized consonant letters, leading to inconsistencies with other ISCII-Unicode script allocations.

See also

References

Sinhala alphabet

The Sinhalese alphabet (Sinhala:සිංහල අක්ෂර මාලාව) (Sinhala Akṣara Malava) is an abugida used by the Sinhala people in Sri Lanka and elsewhere to write the Sinhala language and also the liturgical languages Pali and Sanskrit. Being a member of the Brahmic family of scripts, the Sinhalese script can trace its ancestry back more than 2,500 years.

Sinhalese is often considered two alphabets, or an alphabet within an alphabet, due to the presence of two sets of letters. The core set, known as the śuddha siṃhala (pure Sinhalese, ශුද්ධ සිංහල) or eḷu hōḍiya (Eḷu alphabet එළු හෝඩිය ), can represent all native phonemes. In order to render Sanskrit and Pali words, an extended set, the miśra siṃhala (mixed Sinhalese, මිශ්‍ර සිංහල), is available.

Characteristics

The alphabet is written from left to right. The Sinhalese script is an abugida, as each consonant has an inherent vowel (/a/), which can be changed with the different vowel signs or removed (see image on left for examples).

Most of the Sinhalese letters are curlicues; straight lines are almost completely absent from the alphabet. This is because Sinhala used to be written on dried palm leaves, which would split along the veins on writing straight lines. This was undesirable, and therefore, the round shapes were preferred.