Sinhala script (Sinhalese) සිංහල අක්ෂර මාලාව Siṁhala Akṣara Mālāva
Script type	Abugida
Time period	c. 300 – present[1]
Direction	left-to-right
Languages	Sinhala, Pali, Sanskrit
Related scripts
Parent systems	Egyptian Proto-Sinaitic Phoenician Aramaic Brahmi Sinhala script (Sinhalese)
Sister systems	Tamil-Brahmi, Gupta, Bhattiprolu,Kadamba,Tocharian
ISO 15924
ISO 15924	Sinh (348), ​Sinhala
Unicode
Unicode alias	Sinhala
Unicode range	U+0D80–U+0DFF Sinhala U+111E0–U+111FF Sinhala Archaic Numbers
The theorised Semitic origins of the Brahmi script are not universally agreed upon.

The Sinhala script (Sinhala: සිංහල අක්ෂර මාලාව, romanized: Siṁhala Akṣara Mālāva), also known as Sinhalese script, is a writing system used by the Sinhalese people and most Sri Lankans in Sri Lanka and elsewhere to write the Sinhala language as well as the liturgical languages Pali and Sanskrit.^[2] The Sinhalese Akṣara Mālāva, one of the Brahmic scripts, is a descendant of the Ancient Indian Brahmi script. It is also related to the Grantha script.^[3]

The Sinhala script is an abugida written from left to right. Sinhala letters are classified in two sets. The core set of letters forms the śuddha siṃhala alphabet (Pure Sinhala, ශුද්ධ සිංහල), which is a subset of the miśra siṃhala alphabet (Mixed Sinhala, මිශ්‍ර සිංහල).

History

The Sinhala script is a Brahmi derivate and was thought to have been imported from Northern India around the 3rd century BCE.^[4] It developed in a complex manner, partly independently but also strongly influenced by South Indian scripts at various stages,^[5] manifestly influenced by the early Grantha script.^[2] 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.^[6]

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.^[5] 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.^[7]

Today, the alphabet is used by over 16 million people to write Sinhala in very diverse contexts, such as newspapers, TV commercials, government announcements, graffiti, and schoolbooks.

Sinhala is the main language written in this script, but rare instances of its use for writing Sri Lanka Malay have been recorded.^[8]

Structure

The basic form of the letter k is ක "ka". For "ki", a small arch called ispilla is placed over the ක: කි. This replaces the inherent /a/ by /i/. It is also possible to have no vowel following a consonant. In order to produce such a pure consonant, a special marker, the hal kirīma has to be added: ක්. This marker suppresses the inherent vowel.

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.^[7]

Sinhala letters are ordered into two sets. The core set of letters forms the śuddha siṃhala alphabet (Pure Sinhala, ශුද්ධ සිංහල), which is a subset of the miśra siṃhala alphabet (Mixed Sinhala, මිශ්‍ර සිංහල). This "pure" alphabet contains all the graphemes necessary to write Eḷu (classical Sinhala) as described in the classical grammar Sidatsan̆garā (1300 AD).^[9] This is the reason why this set is also called Eḷu hōdiya ("Eḷu alphabet" එළු හෝඩිය). The definition of the two sets is thus a historic one. Out of pure coincidence, the phoneme inventory of present-day colloquial Sinhala is such that yet again the śuddha alphabet suffices as a good representation of the sounds.^[9] All native phonemes of the Sinhala spoken today can be represented in śuddha, while in order to render special Sanskrit and Pali sounds, one can fall back on miśra siṃhala. This is most notably necessary for the graphemes for the Middle Indic phonemes that the Sinhala language lost during its history, such as aspirates.^[9]

Most phonemes of Sinhala can be represented by a śuddha letter or by a miśra letter, but normally only one of them is considered correct. This one-to-many mapping of phonemes onto graphemes is a frequent source of misspellings.^[10]

While a phoneme can be represented by more than one grapheme, each grapheme can be pronounced in only one way, with the exceptions of the inherent vowel sound, which can be either [a] (stressed) or [ə] (unstressed), and "ව" where the consonant is either [v] or [w] depending on the word. This means that the actual pronunciation of a word is almost always clear from its orthographic form. Stress is almost always predictable; only words with [v] or [w] (which are both allophones of "ව"), and a very few other words need to be learnt individually.

Some pronunciation exceptions in Sinhala:

• කරනවා – to do – [kərənəˈwaː] (not [ˈkarənəˈwaː])
• හතලිහ – forty – [ˈhat̪əlihə] (not [ˈhat̪əliˈha])

Diacritics

The two shapes of the hal kirīma for p (left) and b (right).

In Sinhala the diacritics are called පිලි pili (vowel strokes). දිග diga means "long" because the vowel is sounded for longer and දෙක deka means "two" because the stroke is doubled when written.

Letters

Consonant conjuncts

Śrī

Certain combinations of graphemes trigger special ligatures. Special signs exist for an ර (r) following a consonant (inverted arch underneath), a ර (r) preceding a consonant (loop above) and a ය (y) following a consonant (half a ය on the right). ^{[14] [19] [20]} Furthermore, very frequent combinations are often written in one stroke, like ddh, kv or kś. If this is the case, the first consonant is not marked with a hal kirīma. ^{[14] [16] [20]} The image on the right shows the glyph for śrī, which is composed of the letter ś with a ligature indicating the r below and the vowel ī marked above. Most other conjunct consonants are made with an explicit virama, called al-lakuna or hal kirīma, and the zero-width joiner as shown in the following table, some of which may not display correctly due to limitations of your system. Some of the more common are displayed in the following table. Note that 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. Also note that all of the combinations are encoded with the al-lakuna (Unicode U+0DCA) first, followed by the zero-width joiner (Unicode U+200D) except for touching letters which have the zero-width joiner (Unicode U+200D) first followed by the al-lakuna (Unicode U+0DCA). 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. In the table below, appending "o" (kombuva saha ælepilla – kombuva with ælepilla) to the cluster "ky" /kja/ only adds a single code point, but adds two vowel strokes, one each to the left and right of the consonant cluster.

Letter names

The Sinhala śuddha graphemes are named in a uniform way adding -yanna to the sound produced by the letter, including vocalic diacritics.^[11][21] The name for the letter අ is thus ayanna, for the letter ආ āyanna, for the letter ක kayanna, for the letter කා kāyanna, for the letter කෙ keyanna and so forth. For letters with hal kirīma, an epenthetic a is added for easier pronunciation: the name for the letter ක් is akyanna. Another naming convention is to use al- before a letter with suppressed vowel, thus alkayanna.

Since the extra miśra letters are phonetically not distinguishable from the śuddha letters, proceeding in the same way would lead to confusion. Names of miśra letters are normally made up of the names of two śuddha letters pronounced as one word. The first one indicates the sound, the second one the shape. For example, the aspirated ඛ (kh) is called bayanu kayanna. kayanna indicates the sound, while bayanu indicates the shape: ඛ (kh) is similar in shape to බ (b) (bayunu = like bayanna). Another method is to qualify the miśra aspirates by mahāprāna (ඛ: mahāprāna kayanna) and the miśra retroflexes by mūrdhaja (ළ: mūrdhaja layanna).

Numerals

Sinhala had special symbols to represent numerals, which were in use until the beginning of the 19th century. This system is now superseded by Hindu–Arabic numeral system.^[22][23]

Sinhala Illakkam (Sinhala Archaic Numbers)

Sinhala Illakkam were used for writing numbers prior to the fall of Kandyan Kingdom in 1815. These digits did not have a zero instead the numbers had signs for 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100, 1000. These digits and numbers can be seen primarily in Royal documents and artefacts.

Sinhala Lith Illakkam (Sinhala Astrological Numbers)

Prior to the fall of Kandyan Kingdom all calculations were carried out using Lith digits. After the fall of the Kandyan Kingdom, Sinhala Lith Illakkam were primarily used for writing horoscopes. However, there is evidence that they were used for other purposes such as writing page numbers, etc. The tradition of writing degrees and minutes of zodiac signs in horoscopes continued into the 20th century using different versions of Lith Digits. Unlike the Sinhala Illakkam, Sinhala Lith Illakkam included a 0.

Neither the Sinhala numerals nor U+0DF4 ෴ Sinhala punctuation 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.^[24]

Transliteration

Sinhala transliteration (Sinhala: රෝම අකුරින් ලිවීම rōma akurin livīma, literally "Roman letter writing") can be done in analogy to Devanāgarī transliteration.

Layman's transliterations in Sri Lanka normally follow neither of these. Vowels are transliterated according to English spelling equivalences, which can yield a variety of spellings for a number of phonemes. /iː/ for instance can be ⟨ee⟩, ⟨e⟩, ⟨ea⟩, ⟨i⟩, etc. A transliteration pattern peculiar to Sinhala, and facilitated by the absence of phonemic aspirates, is the use of ⟨th⟩ for the voiceless dental plosive, and the use of ⟨t⟩ for the voiceless retroflex plosive. This is presumably because the retroflex plosive /ʈ/ is perceived the same as the English alveolar plosive /t/, and the Sinhala dental plosive /t̪/ is equated with the English voiceless dental fricative /θ/.^[25] Dental and retroflex voiced plosives are always rendered as ⟨d⟩, though, presumably because ⟨dh⟩ is not found as a representation of /ð/ in English orthography.

Use for the Pali language

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. The following table lays out the Sinhala representations of Pali consonants with their standard academic Romanizations:

The vowels are a subset of those for writing Sinhala:

The niggahīta is represented with the sign ං. Consonant sequences may be combined in ligatures in a manner identical to that described above for Sinhala.

As an example, below is the first verse from the Dhammapada in Pali in Sinhala script, followed by Romanization:

මනොපුබ්‌බඞ්‌ගමා ධම්‌මා, මනොසෙට්‌ඨා මනොමයා;
මනසා චෙ පදුට්‌ඨෙන, භාසති වා කරොති වා;
තතො නං දුක්‌ඛමන්‌වෙති, චක්‌කංව වහතො පදං.

Manopubbaṅgamā dhammā, manoseṭṭhā manomayā;
manasā ce paduṭṭhena bhāsati vā karoti vā;
tato naṁ dukkhamanveti cakkaṁva vahato padaṁ.

— Yamaka-vaggo 1

Relation to other scripts

Similarities

Sinhala is one of the Brahmic scripts, and thus shares many similarities with other members of the family, such as the Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, Tamil script and Devanāgarī. As a general example, /a/ is the inherent vowel in all these scripts.^[2] Other similarities include the diacritic for ⟨ai⟩, which resembles a doubled ⟨e⟩ in all scripts and the diacritic for ⟨au⟩ which is composed of preceding ⟨e⟩ and following ⟨ḷ⟩.

Likewise, the combination of the diacritics for ⟨e⟩ and ⟨ā⟩ yields ⟨o⟩ in all these scripts.

Differences

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).^[26]

Another feature that distinguishes Sinhala from its sister Indo-Aryan languages is the presence of a set of five nasal sounds known as half-nasal or prenasalized stops.

Computer encoding

Sinhala language support in Linux. Firefox is shown in the background, with mlterm in the foreground with text having been entered into it by ibus-m17n.

Generally speaking, Sinhala support is less developed than support for Devanāgarī, for instance. A recurring problem is the rendering of diacritics which precede the consonant and diacritic signs which come in different shapes, like the one for ⟨u⟩.

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.^[27] 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.

See also

• Sinhala Braille
• History of Sinhala software
• Loanwords
  • Dutch loanwords in Sinhala
  • English loanwords in Sinhala
  • Portuguese loanwords in Sinhala
  • Tamil loanwords in Sinhala

References

Further reading

• Coperahewa, Sandagomi. Sinhala Akuru Puranaya [Chronicle of Sinhala Letters] Nugegoda: Sarasavi, 2018.
• Daniels, Peter T. (1996). "Sinhala alphabet". The World's Writing Systems. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-507993-0.
• Fairbanks, G. W.; J. W. Gair; M. W. S. D. Silva (1968). Colloquial Sinhalese (Sinhala). Ithaca, NY: South Asia Programm, Cornell University.
• Gair, J. W.; John C. Paolillo (1997). Sinhala. München, Newcastle: South Asia Programm, Cornell University.
• Geiger, Wilhelm (1995). A Grammar of the Sinhalese Language. New Delhi: AES Reprint.
• Jayawardena-Moser, Premalatha (2004). Grundwortschatz Singhalesisch – Deutsch (3 ed.). Wiesbaden: Harassowitz.
• Karunatillake, W. S. (1992). An Introduction to Spoken Sinhala ([several new editions] ed.). Colombo.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Matzel, Klaus (1983). Einführung in die singhalesische Sprache. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Sinhala script.

• Scripts (ISO 15924) "Sinhala"
• Sinhala Unicode Characters
• Sinhala Unicode Characters
• Sinhala Unicode Character Code Chart
• Sinhala Archaic Numbers Unicode Character Code Chart
• Complete table of consonant-diacritic-combinations Archived 6 August 2009 at the Wayback Machine

Online resources

• Sinhala guide of the Sinhala Wikipedia (in English)
• Online Sinhala Unicode Writer
• Sinhala English Dictionary and Sinhala To Hindi Language Translator
• Sinhala Unicode Support Group
• Online Unicode Converter