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Sinhala ICT Glossary
About Sinhala and Unicode :
U+0D80 - U+0DFF
The Sinhala Script, also known as Sinhalese, is used to write the Sinhala Language, the majority language of Sri Lanka, It is also used to write the Pali and Sanskrit languages. The script is a descendant of Brahmo and resembles the scripts of Sount india in form and Structure.
Sinhala differs from other languages of the region in that it has a series of
penasalized stops that are distinguished from the combination of a nasal followed by a stop. In other words, both forms occur and are written differentlyfor example:
අඬ [ U0D85 + U0DAC ] - a.Nda "sound" versus අණ්ඩ [ U0D85 + U0DAB + U0DCA + U0DA9 ] - a.n.da "egg".
In addition, Sinhala has separate distinct signs for both a short and long low front vowel sounding similar to the initial vowel of the English word "apple," usually represented in IPA as U00E6
( ae ). The Independent forms of these vowels are encoded at U0D87 and U0D88; the corresponding dependent forms are U0DD0 and U0DD1.
Because of these extra letters, the encoding for sinhala does not precisely follow the pattern established for the other indic scripts ( Eg : Devanagari ), but does use the same general structure, making use of phonetic order, matra reordering, and use of the virama ( U0DCA sinhala sign al-lakuna) to indicate conjunct consonant clusters. Sinhala does not use half-forms in the Devanagari manner, but does use many ligatures. |
