The Sinhalese script (), also known as Sinhala script, is a writing system used by the Sinhalese people and most Sri Lankans in Sri Lanka and elsewhere to write the Sinhalese language as well as the liturgical languages Pali and Sanskrit. The Sinhalese Akṣara Mālāva, one of the Brahmic scripts, is a descendant of the Ancient Indian Brahmi script. It is thought to be derived from Grantha script.
History The Sinhala script is a Brahmi derivate and was thought to have been imported from Northern India around the 3rd century BCE. It developed in a complex manner, partly independently but also strongly influenced by South Indian scripts at various stages, manifestly influenced by the early Grantha script. Pottery from the 6th century BCE has been found in Anuradhapura with lithic Brahmi inscriptions written in Helu Prakrit. It has caused debate as to whether Ceylonese Brahmi influenced Brahmi in the Indian mainland.
Medieval Sinhalese, which emerged around 750 AD, is thought to be derived from Grantha script. Although, it has to be noted that between the Proto-Sinhalese and the Medieval Sinhalese that the found inscriptions are radically different, thus, it looks like a break. However, according to the author Diringer a new script which has been derived from the Grantha script "was also later employed for official inscriptions". Subsequently, Medieval (and modern) Sinhalese resemble the South Indian scripts. The earliest surviving literature is from the 9th century CE, by this time around the script became more prevalent and was used in other contexts as well. 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. 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.
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.
Structure
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 (), which can be changed with a different vowel stroke. To represent different sounds it is necessary to add vowel strokes, or diacritics called (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.
Sinhala letters are ordered into two sets. The core set of letters forms the pure Sinhala () alphabet, which is a subset of the mixed Sinhala () alphabet. The definition of the two sets is thus a historic one. The śuddha alphabet, also called the Eḷu alphabet (), contains everything necessary to write Eḷu, or classical Sinhala, as described in the classical grammar Sidatsan̆garā (1300 AD). The śuddha alphabet is also a good representation of the phoneme inventory of present-day colloquial Sinhala; all native sounds of the Modern Sinhala can be represented by . The śuddha also includes the letters and diacritics for the retroflex consonants and , which are not phonemic in modern Sinhala but are needed for the representation of Eḷu. However, words which historically contained these two phonemes are still often written with these letters, despite changes in pronunciation.
The alphabet includes letters for Middle 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 letters is mainly a question of prestige. From a purely phonemic point of view, their sounds can all be represented by śuddha letters.
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. Additionally, the śuddha set itself contains both and , as well as and , and neither pair is distinctive in Modern sinhala. 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, with the exceptions of the inherent vowel sound, which can be either (stressed) or (unstressed), and "ව" where the consonant is either or depending on the word. This means that the actual pronunciation of a word is almost always clear from its spelling. Stress is almost always predictable; only words with or (which are both allophones of "ව"), and a very few other words need to be learnt individually.
Consonants The 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, which in Sinhala is .
+ Śuddha and miśra consonantsUnvoicedVoicedNasalApproximantSibilantFricativeOther Inaspirate Aspirated Inaspirate Aspirate velar palatal retroflex dental labial
Prenasalization The prenasalized consonants resemble their plain counterparts. , m̆ba is made up of the left half of ma and the right half of ba, while the other three are just like the grapheme for the plosive with a little stroke added. Vowel diacritics attach to a prenasalised consonant in the same way as they would to the corresponding plain plosives.
+ Prenasalized consonants
Consonant conjuncts
Certain combinations of letters are written with ligatures. Some graphical conventions include a ra following a consonant represented by an inverted arch (rakāransaya), a r preceding a consonant by a loop above (rēpaya), and a , ya following a consonant as a half of a ya on the right (yansaya). Some very frequent combinations can be written in one stroke, like , ddha, , kwa or , kś.
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.
+ Examples of combined letters
Vowels and diacritics Each vowel has two forms, an independent and a diacritic or vowel stroke (). 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.
While most diacritics are regular, , u and ū take on a different shape when attached to a , ka, , ga, , n̆ga, , ta, , bha, or , śa. E.g.: , ku, , kū.
The inherent vowel of a letter can be removed by a hal kirīma (◌්), which has two shapes depending on which consonant it attaches to.
Combinations of ර(r) or ළ(ḷ) with have idiosyncratic shapes, viz රු (ru), රූ (rū), ළු (ḷu) and ළූ (ḷū). The diacritic used for රු (ru) and රූ (rū) is what is normally used for the , and therefore there are idiosyncratic forms for ræ and rǣ, viz රැ and රෑ.
Śuddha vowels
There are six long and six short śuddha vowels.
+ Śuddha short vowels, hal kirīma, and examples with , ka and , ba.
+ Śuddha long vowels and examples with , ka and , ba.
Miśra vowels and vocalics 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.
The miśra can also be written with śuddha + or +, which corresponds to the actual pronunciation. The miśra syllabic ḷ can be replaced by śuddha +. Miśra is rendered as śuddha , miśra as śuddha .
+Miśra vowels and vocalics, and examples with
Other diacritics The anusvara (often called binduva 'zero') is represented by one small circle , and the visarga (technically part of the miśra alphabet) by two .
Letter names 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).
Numerals
Sinhala had its numerals (), which were used from prior to the fall of Kandyan Kingdom in 1815. They can be seen primarily in Royal documents and artefacts. Sinhala Illakkam did not have a zero, but did have signs for 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100, 1000.
This system has been replaced by the Hindu–Arabic numeral system.
+Sinhala illakkam
Astrological numbers Prior to the fall of Kandyan Kingdom all calculations were carried out using . 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.
+Sinhala lith illakkam
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.
Transliteration Sinhala transliteration (Sinhala: රෝම අකුරින් ලිවීම rōma akurin liwīma, 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.