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Writing Sinhala

The characters used to write sinhala and found all over the place in Sri Lanka are looking pretty smooth and extraordinary. Over here we will see how to write this nice symbols.

1. Writing Sinhala ()
The first time you see some sinhala writing, it is amazing how cute this signs look and you can't imagine how it is possible to learn them at all. If you look closer you recognize an endless number of different signs which are on the other hand pretty similar to each other. But if you take some time you will see how all of this numerous signs can be sticked together by using some rules we want to discover over here.

The huge difference between our type of writing (using letters) is the fact that in sinhala you are writing SYLLABS instead of letters. So you are not writing one letter after another, but you are always writing a combination of letters - a syllab. Excempt from the vocals (a,e,i,o,u), each syllab consists of a consonant (all non-vocals) and an inherent vocal. The default vocal after a consonant is always the "a".

But let's forget the theory and see our first sign :

= ma
The sign stands for an m and an a afterwards. It is even pronounced like that (the "a" is like the "a" in father). And by the way, if you write this sign twice, you get

, which means "I" - so you can write already about yourself.

Let's stick to the sign "ma" and explore it a little bit. If you want to change the inherent "a" to another vocal, just add a couple of strokes and that's it.

To make an "mi" out of the "ma" we need to add some strokes on top of the sign (the "i" is a pretty high sound so go to the top of the sign). So we add an opened loop and that's it :

=mi

We can try to make even an "mu" out of our sign. The "u" is a pretty deep sound, so let's add a loop at the bottom of our sign :

=mu. Be aware the there is an edge at this loop on the bottom right side.

OK, so we are done with the vocals "a", "i" and "u". Basically just two of them are still missing.

Next is the "e". In this case we keep the stem sign (the one with the "a" -

) and prepend a circle which is similar to the @ sign used in e-mail addresses. So we get :