The consonant modifiers of the Sinhala script occur in two different forms, as vocalic strokes and non-vocalic strokes. The consonant modifiers, their names, and vowel representations are given in Table 4. The symbols are given in Table 5. These consonant modifiers can occur on the left, right, and top of any Tamil consonants. It is evident that the Sinhala character set consisting of vowels, semi-consonants, consonants, and consonant modifiers and the Tamil set consisting of vowels, consonants, and consonant modifiers have clear differences, mainly with respect to the size of characters.
Some characters are much bigger than others, for instance.
Their shapes also differ. Although the basic shape of characters is curved, some parts, such as the upper or lower part, may not be contained in the same line. Unlike in English, most of the Indic language consonant modifiers could be positioned at different locations around the character. These modifiers for Sinhala can be classified as follows. For Tamil they can be classified into three groups.