![]() The use of the extra letters is mainly a question of prestige. 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 miśra alphabet is a superset of śuddha. Used in conjunction with kombuva for consonants. Using the consonant 'k' + 'vowel' as an example: දිග diga means 'long' because the vowel is sounded for longer and දෙක deka means 'two' because the stroke is doubled when written. In Sinhala the diacritics are called පිලි pili (vowel strokes). ![]() This is most notably necessary for the graphemes for the Middle Indic phonemes that the Sinhala language lost during its history, such as aspirates. All native phonemes of the Sinhala spoken today can be represented in śuddha, while in order to render special Sanskrit and Pali sounds, one can fall back on miśra siṃhala. 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. The definition of the two sets is thus a historic one. This is the reason why this set is also called Eḷu hōdiya ('Eḷu alphabet' එළු හෝඩිය). ![]() This 'pure' alphabet contains all the graphemes necessary to write Eḷu (classical Sinhala) as described in the classical grammar Sidatsan̆garā (1300 AD). The core set of letters forms the śuddha siṃhala alphabet (Pure Sinhala, ශුද්ධ සිංහල), which is a subset of the miśra siṃhala alphabet (Mixed Sinhala, මිශ්ර සිංහල). Sinhala letters are ordered into two sets. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
February 2023
Categories |