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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.
Etymology. Sinhala ( Siṃhala) is a Sanskrit term; the corresponding Middle Indo-Aryan ( Eḷu) word is Sīhala . The name is a derivative of siṃha, the Sanskrit word for 'lion'. [12] The name is sometimes glossed as 'abode of lions', and attributed to a supposed former abundance of lions on the island.
Sinhala is a Unicode block containing characters for the Sinhala and Pali languages of Sri Lanka, and is also used for writing Sanskrit in Sri Lanka. The Sinhala allocation is loosely based on the ISCII standard, except that Sinhala contains extra prenasalized consonant letters, leading to inconsistencies with other ISCII-Unicode script allocations.
List of ISO 639 language codes. ISO 639 is a standardized nomenclature used to classify languages. [1] Each language is assigned a two-letter (set 1) and three-letter lowercase abbreviation (sets 2–5). [2] Part 1 of the standard, ISO 639-1 defines the two-letter codes, and Part 3 (2007), ISO 639-3, defines the three-letter codes, aiming to ...
The vast majority of abugidas are found from India to Southeast Asia and belong historically to the Brāhmī family, however the term is derived from the first characters of the abugida in Ge'ez: አ (A) ቡ (bu) ጊ (gi) ዳ (da) — (compare with alphabet). Unlike abjads, the diacritical marks and systemic modifications of the consonants are ...
The Sinhalese people ( Sinhala: සිංහල ජනතාව, romanized: Sinhala Janathāva ), also known as the Sinhalese or Sinhala people are an Indo-Aryan ethno-linguistic group native to the island of Sri Lanka. [15] [16] They are the largest ethnic group in Sri Lanka, constituting about 75% of the Sri Lankan population and number more ...
Devanāgarī is part of the Brahmic family of scripts of India, Nepal, Tibet, and Southeast Asia. [23] [24] It is a descendant of the 3rd century BCE Brāhmī script, which evolved into the Nagari script which in turn gave birth to Devanāgarī and Nandināgarī. Devanāgarī has been widely adopted across India and Nepal to write Sanskrit ...
The Sinhala alphabet comprises 60 letters whereas English has only 26. Moreover, Sinhala has a syllable based alphabet and two English characters had to be used to represent one Sinhala consonant, thus distorting the semblance to sighted print.