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Font: Sinhalese
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Belonging to the group of Southern Indic scripts, Sinhalese script is a descendant of the ancient Brahmi script. It is used in Sri Lanka for writing the Sinhalese language, as well as Pali and Sanskrit. Although it is one of the two national languages of Sri Lanka, the Sinhalese language belongs to the Indo-Aryan group which includes Northern Indian languages such as Hindi. Tamil, the other national language of Sri Lanka, is a Dravidian language. The development of Sinhalese script was strongly influenced by Grantha script, the earlier script of Tamil. As other Brahmi-derived Indic scripts, Sinhalese demonstrates the major features of that model.1 It is a syllabic alphabet whose basic unit is the consonant-based syllable with an inherent vowel. Similar to other Southern Indic scripts, Sinhalese script typically has rounded features.
Sinhalese is written horizontally from left to right and its basic set of symbols consists of 34 consonants2 and 16 vowels. At the beginning of a word, vowels appear in independent form. When used to replace the inherent vowel of a consonantal syllable, vowels appear in diacritic (or satellite) form before, after, above, below or surrounding the modified syllable. In many cases, consonant-vowel combinations are written with special ligatures which break the predictable pattern. A group of consonants without intervening vowels form a 'consonant cluster' which can often be written with a special symbol called a 'conjunct', of which Sinhalese is known to have a large selection. While some conjuncts have recognizable parts, many are complex and not easily analyzed into component parts. However, a simpler form of any cluster can be written by concatenating all the component consonants, placing the vowel suppressor (known as hal kirima) on all but the final one. The binduva, traditionally an indicator of nasalization, is used in Modern Sinhalese to indicate a nasal consonant. Traditionally, words were not separated by spaces and the end of a sentence was marked with a serpentine sign called kundaliya. However, in current practice, European punctuation is used and words are separated by spaces. Likewise, although Sinhalese has a native set of symbols for numerals, nowadays Arabic numbers are used.
1 For a fuller description of the features of Brahmi-derived scripts, see 'Devanagari'.
2 The exact number of symbols needed for any particular language can vary. An extended set is needed for Sanskrit and Pali.
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