සිංහල අක්ෂර මාලාව

** සිංහල අක්ෂර මාලාව** යනු සිංහල භාෂාව සහ සමහරවිට පාලි හෝ සංස්කෘත භාෂාවන් ලියනු ලබන අක්ෂර මාලාවයි. සිංහල අක්ෂර මාලාව පිළිබඳ විද්වත් මත වලට අනුව සිංහල අකාරය ආකාර දෙකකි.එනම් සංවෘත හා විවෘත භේදයයි .

## Characteristics
The alphabet is written from left to right. The Sinhalese script is an abugida, as each consonant has an inherent vowel (), 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.

The core set of letters forms the '''''*** alphabet (pure Sinhalese, ශුද්ධ සිංහලimg), which is a subset of the ****** alphabet (mixed Sinhalese, මිශ්‍ර සිංහල). This "pure" alphabet contains all the graphemes necessary to write Eḷu  (classical Sinhalese) as described in the classical grammar Sidatsan̆garā (1300 AD). This is the reason why this set is also called ***Eḷu hōdiya'''* ("Eḷu alphabet" එළු හෝඩියimg).

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.

Neither the Sinhala numerals nor U+0DF4  ෴  Sinhalese punctuation kunddaliya is in general use today. The kunddaliya was formerly used as a full stop.

## History and usage
The Sinhalese script is a Brahmi derivate, and was imported from Northern India, around the 3rd century BCE, but was influenced at various stages by South Indian scripts, manifestly influenced by the early Grantha script.

By the 9th century CE, literature written in Sinhalese 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 the Sinhalese alphabet.

Today, the alphabet is used by approximately 16,000,000 people to write the Sinhalese language 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 Sri Lanka Malay are recorded.*තහවුරු කර නොමැත*&#x5D;

## Relations between orthography and phonology
Most phonemes of the Sinhalese language 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.

While a phoneme can be represented by more than one grapheme, each grapheme can be pronounced in only one way. This means that the actual pronunciation of a word is always clear from its orthographic form.

## Śuddha graphemes
The *śuddha* graphemes are the mainstay of the Sinhalese alphabet and are used on an everyday-basis. Every sequence of sounds of the Sinhalese language of today can be represented by these graphemes. Additionally, the *śuddha* set comprises graphemes for retroflex  and , which are no longer phonemic in modern Sinhala. These two letters were needed for the representation of Eḷu, but are now obsolete from a purely phonemic view. However, words which historically contain these two phonemes are still often written with the graphemes representing the retroflex sounds.

### Consonants
The *śuddha* alphabet comprises 8 plosives, 2 fricatives, 2 affricates, 2 nasals, 2 liquids and 2 glides. Additionally, there are the two graphemes for the retroflex sounds  and , which are not phonemic in modern Sinhala, but which still form part of the set. These are shaded in the table.

The voiceless affricate (ච ) is not included in the *śuddha* set by purists since it does not occur in the main text of the Sidatsan̆garā. The Sidatsan̆garā does use it in examples though, so this sound did exist in Eḷu. In any case, it is needed for the representation of modern Sinhala.

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.

### Prenasalized consonants
The prenasalized consonants resemble their plain counterparts.  is made up  by the left half of  and the right half of , while the other three are just like the grapheme for the plosive with a little stroke attached to their left. Vowel diacritics attach in the same way as they would to the corresponding plain plosive.

### Non-vocalic diacritics
]]
The anusvara (often called *binduva'' 'zero' ) is represented by one small circle ං (Unicode 0D82), and the visarga (technically part of the *miśra* alphabet) by two ඃ (Unicode 0D83). The inherent vowel can be removed by a special virama diacritic, the *hal kirīma* ( ්), which has two shapes depending on which consonant it attaches to. Both are represented in the image on the right side. The first one is the most common one, while the second one is used for letters ending at the top left corner.

## *Miśra* set
The *miśra* alphabet is a superset of *śuddha*. It adds letters for aspirates, retroflexes and sibilants, which are not phonemic in today's Sinhala, but which are necessary to represent non-native words, like loanwords from Sanskrit, Pali or English. The use of the extra letters is mainly a question of prestige. From a purely phonemic point of view, there is no benefit in using them, and they can be replaced by a (sequence of) *śuddha* letters as follows: For the *miśra* aspirates, the replacement is the plain *śuddha* counterpart, for the *miśra* retroflex liquids the corresponding *śuddha* coronal liquid, for the sibilants, .  ඤ (ñ) and  ඥ (gn) cannot be represented by *śuddha* graphemes but are found only in fewer than 10 words each. ෆ fa can be represented by ප pa with a Latin  inscribed in the cup.

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

The *miśra*  can also be written with *śuddha* + or +, which corresponds to the actual pronunciation. The *miśra* syllabic  is obsolete, but can be rendered by *śuddha* +. Miśra  is rendered as  *śuddha* , *miśra*   as *śuddha* .

Note that the transliteration of both ළ් and ෟ is . This is not very problematic as the second one is extremely scarce.

## Names of the graphemes
The letters of the English alphabet have more or less arbitrary names, e.g. *em* for the letter  or *bee* for the letter . The Sinhala *śuddha* graphemes are named in a uniform way adding *-yanna* to the sound produced by the letter, including vocalic diacritics. 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*).

## Consonant conjuncts
]]
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).

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*.

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.

## Sinhala 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.  for instance can be , , , , etc.
A transliteration pattern peculiar to Sinhala, and facilitated by the absence of phonemic aspirates, is the use of  for the voiceless dental plosive, and the use of  for the voiceless retroflex plosive.
This is presumably because the retroflex plosive  is perceived the same as the English alveolar plosive , and the Sinhala dental plosive  is equated with the English  voiceless dental fricative . Dental and retroflex voiced plosives are always rendered as , though, presumably because  is not found as a representation of  in English orthography.

## Unicode
Sinhalese script was added to the Unicode Standard in September 1999 with the release of version 3.0.
This character allocation has been adopted in Sri Lanka as the Standard SLS1134.

The main Unicode block for Sinhala is U+0D80–U+0DFF. Another block, Sinhala Archaic Numbers, was added to Unicode in version 7.0.0 in June 2014. Its range is U+111E0–U+111FF.

## Computer support
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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 .

Sinhala does not come built in with Windows XP, unlike Tamil and Hindi. However, all versions of Windows Vista and Windows 10 come with Sinhala support by default, and do not require external fonts to be installed to read Sinhalese script. *Nirmala UI* is the default Sinhala font in windows 10.

For Mac OS X, Sinhala font and keyboard support can be found at *web.nickshanks.com/typography/* and at *www.xenotypetech.com/osxSinhala.html*.

For Linux, the IBus, and SCIM input methods allow the use Sinhalese script in applications with support for a number of key maps and techniques such as traditional, phonetic and assisted techniques. In addition, newer versions of Android mobile operating system also support both rendering and input of the Sinhala script.

### Online resources
* Sinhala guide of the Sinhalese Wikipedia (in English)
* Online Sinhala Unicode Writer
* Sinhala English Dictionary and Sinhala To Hindi Language Translator 
* Sinhala Unicode Support Group
* Online Unicode Converter
* Sinhala spell checker 

## Image list for readers with font problems
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## See also
* Sinhalese Braille
* Dutch loanwords in Sinhala
* English loanwords in Sinhala
* Portuguese loanwords in Sinhala
* Tamil loanwords in Sinhala
* History of Sinhala software
* Singlish Typewriter

## Notes
## References
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## External links
*Sinhala Unicode Character Code Chart
*Sinhala Archaic Numbers Unicode Character Code Chart
*Complete table of consonant-diacritic-combinations 
*Complete table of consonant-diacritic-combinations as text 
*Sinhala page at Omniglot
**Sinhala basic course*, module 1, "Beginning signs and letters"  (Bonny Graham MacDougall and Kamini de Abrew, Foreign service institute)

*Transliteration Add-on for Firefox (Tamil script to Sinhalese script) 
*Sinhala Accepted As One Of The World’s Most Creative Alphabets
*Sinhala Unicode Converter