Full Sinhala Alphabet

[Miss Ruhnke]

Sinhala is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by about 16 million Sinhalese people in Sri Lanka. It also used as a second language by another 3 million people belonging to other ethnic groups in Sri Lanka, where it is one of the official and national languages, along with Tamil. There are also considerable numbers of Sinhala speakers in Singapore, Thailand, Canada and the United Arab Emirates.

Sinhala is also known as Sinhalese or Singhala - the latter version is closer to the pronunciation native name. The native name of the language is සිහල (Siṃhāla), which comes from Sanskrit and could be translated as "lion-seizer", "lion-killer" or "lion blood", which refer to the legendary founder of the Sinhala people, Prince Vijaya, a descendant of Sinhabahu/Sīhabāhu ("Lion-arms"), the son of a princess of the Vanga Kingdom and a lion.

The Sinhala alphabet, a descendent of the Brahmi script, started to appear in Prakrit inscriptions during the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. Both the alphabet and the language have changed considerably since then. The earliest surviving literature in Sinhala dates from the 9th century AD.

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The Sinhala script is a Brahmi derivate and was thought to have been imported from Northern India around the 3rd century BCE.[5] It developed in a complex manner, partly independently but also strongly influenced by South Indian scripts at various stages,[6] ultimately descending from Grantha script.[3] Pottery from the 6th century BCE has been found in Anuradhapura with lithic Brahmi inscriptions written in Prakrit or Sinhala Prakrit. It has caused debate as to whether Ceylonese Brahmi influenced Brahmi in the Indian mainland.[7]

Medieval Sinhalese, which emerged around 750 AD, is marked by very strong influence from the Grantha script.[1] Subsequently, Medieval (and modern) Sinhalese resemble the South Indian scripts.[6] By the 9th century CE, literature written in the Sinhala script had emerged and the script began to be used in other contexts. For instance, the Buddhist literature of the Theravada-Buddhists of Sri Lanka, written in Pali, used Sinhala script.

Modern Sinhalese emerged in the 13th century and is marked by the composition of the grammar book Sidat Sangara.[1] In 1736, the Dutch were the first to print with Sinhala type on the island. The resulting type followed the features of the native Sinhala script used on palm leaves. The type created by the Dutch was monolinear and geometric in fashion, with no separation between words in early documents. During the second half of the 19th century, during the colonial period, a new style of Sinhala letterforms emerged in opposition to the monolinear and geometric form that used high contrast and had varied thicknesses. This high contrast type gradually replaced the monolinear type as the preferred style and continues to be used in the present day. The high contrast style is still preferred for text typesetting in printed newspapers, books, and magazines in Sri Lanka.[8]

Sinhala script is an abugida written from left to right. It uses consonants as the basic unit for word construction as each consonant has an inherent vowel (/a/), which can be changed with a different vowel stroke. To represent different sounds it is necessary to add vowel strokes, or diacritics called පිලි (Pili), that can be used before, after, above, or below the base-consonant. Most of the Sinhala letters are curlicues; straight lines are almost completely absent from the alphabet, and it does not have joining characters. 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. Upper and lower cases do not exist in Sinhala.[8]

The miśra siṃhala alphabet includes letters forMiddle Indic aspirate, retroflex and sibilant consonants which are not found in modern Sinhala, but are used in the transcription of are used for transcribing loanwords from Sanskrit (tatsama), Pali or English. Although modern Sinhala sounds are not aspirated, aspiration is marked in the sound where it was historically present, to highlight the differences in modern spelling. The use of miśra siṃhala letters is mainly a question of prestige. From a purely phonemic point of view, their sounds can all be represented by by śuddha letters.[10]

Although most phonemes of Sinhala can be represented by a śuddha letter or by a miśra letter, normally only one of them is considered correct. This one-to-many mapping of phonemes onto graphemes is a frequent source of misspellings.[11]

The śuddha alphabet includes eight plosives, two fricatives, two affricates, two nasals, two liquids and two glides. As in other Brahmic scripts, each consonant carries an inherent vowel, /a/.

Touching letters were used in ancient scriptures but are not used in modern Sinhala. Vowels may be attached to any of the ligatures formed, attaching to the rightmost part of the glyph except for vowels that use the kombuva, where the kombuva is written before the ligature or cluster and the remainder of the vowel, if any, is attached to the rightmost part.

Each vowel has two forms, an independent and a diacritic or vowel stroke (Sinhala: පිලි, romanized: pili). The independent form is used when a vowel occurs at the beginning of a word. The diacritic is used when a vowel follows a consonant.

There are six additional vowel and syllabic consonants in the miśra alphabet. The two diphthongs are quite common, while the vocalic ṛ is much rarer, and ḷ is all but obsolete. The latter two are almost exclusively found in loanwords from Sanskrit.[17]

Prior to the fall of Kandyan Kingdom all calculations were carried out using Sinhala lith illakkam. After that event, Sinhala lith illakkam became known as or Sinhala astrological number and were primarily used for writing horoscopes. The tradition of writing degrees and minutes of zodiac signs in lith numbers continued into the 20th century. Unlike the Sinhala illakkam, Sinhala lith illakkam included a 0.

Neither the Sinhala numerals nor the Sinhala punctuation mark kunddaliya is in general use today, but some use it in social media, Internet messaging and blogs. The kunddaliya was formerly used as a full stop.[25]

Many of the oldest Pali manuscripts are written in the Sinhala script. Miśra consonants are used to represent Pali phonemes that have no Sinhala counterpart. Consonant sequences may be combined in ligatures the same way as inSinhala.

Sinhala alphabet differs from other Indo-Aryan alphabets in that it contains a pair of vowel sounds (U+0DD0 and U+0DD1 in the proposed Unicode Standard) that are unique to it. These are the two vowel sounds that are similar to the two vowel sounds that occur at the beginning of the English words at (ඇ) and ant (ඈ).[27]

Sinhala support did not come built in with Microsoft Windows XP, unlike Tamil and Hindi, but was supported by third-party means such as Keyman by SIL International. Thereafter, all versions of Windows Vista and above, including Windows 10 come with Sinhala support by default, and do not require external fonts to be installed to read Sinhala script. Nirmala UI is the default Sinhala font in Windows 10. The latest versions of Windows 10 have added support for Sinhala Archaic Numbers that were not supported by default in previous versions.

For macOS, Apple Inc. has provided Sinhala font support for versions of macOS that are Catalina and above through Unicode integration. Keyboard support is available by third-party means such as Helakuru and Keyman. In Mac OS X, Sinhala font and keyboard support were provided by Nickshanks and Xenotypetech.

For Linux, the IBus, and SCIM input methods allow the use Sinhala script in applications with support for a number of key maps and techniques such as traditional, phonetic and assisted techniques.[28] In addition, newer versions of the Android mobile operating system also support both rendering and input of Sinhala script by default and applications like Helakuru serve as dedicated keyboard integrators.

Sinhala (/ˈsɪnhələ, ˈsɪŋələ/ SIN-hə-lə, SING-ə-lə;[2] Sinhala: සිහල, siṁhala, [ˈsiŋɦələ]),[3] sometimes called Sinhalese (/ˌsɪn(h)əˈliːz, ˌsɪŋ(ɡ)əˈliːz/ SIN-(h)ə-LEEZ, SING-(g)ə-LEEZ), is an Indo-Aryan language primarily spoken by the Sinhalese people of Sri Lanka, who make up the largest ethnic group on the island, numbering about 16 million.[4][1] Sinhala is also spoken as the first language by other ethnic groups in Sri Lanka, totalling about 2 million speakers as of 2001.[5] It is written using the Sinhala script, which is a Brahmic script closely related to the Grantha script of South India.[6]

Early forms of the Sinhala language are attested as early as the 3rd century BCE.[7] The language of these inscriptions, still retaining long vowels and aspirated consonants, is a Prakrit similar to Magadhi, a regional associate of the Middle Indian Prakrits that had been used during the time of the Buddha.[8] The most closely related languages are the Vedda language (an endangered, indigenous creole still spoken by a minority of Sri Lankans, mixing Sinhala with an isolate of unknown origin and from which Old Sinhala borrowed various aspects into its main Indo-Aryan substrate), and the Maldivian language.It has two main varieties, written and spoken, and is a conspicuous example of the linguistic phenomenon known as diglossia.[9][10]

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