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 CLICK quick read TABLE
OF SINHALA PLACE NAMES & TAMIL FORMS.
කෙටි ලැඉස්තුව 		Postings
වෙසෙස් ලිපි 		Maps with Sinhala place names
සිතියම් 		මුල් පිට
Main webpage 		Sinhala Technical Terms
සිංහල තෙක්න වදන් 		Sinhala Plant names - Ethnobotany
උද්භිද නම් → සිංහල නාම

Na Mala

 Naa නා (national tree) මල flower


Writing Sinhala with a standard English keyboard- an efficient transliteration scheme: an e2s-map.


The letters in a Sinhala word almost fully (>90%) determine the pronunciation of the word. Thus we need a cluster of english letters for each sound unit of the sinhala word. No capital letters are normally used in Sinhala writng.
we begin with a few examples:
&#x;
English Sinhala Sinhala written with the english keyboard
Tibet ටි බෙ ට් ti be t
Tasmeniya ටැ ස් මේ නි යා tae s me~ ni ya~
Tibet Lasha Tokyo Japanටිබෙට් ලා ෂා ටෝකියෝ ජපෑන් ti be t,   la~ sha~,   To~ ki yo~,   Jae pae~ n,


Thus the word TIBET, or tibet is made up of three clusters ti, be, t,. Here we have two-letter and one-letter clusters. TASMENIYA is made up of five clusters TAE, S, ME~, Ni, YA, where we have used the ~ symbol to indicate that the "me" is a elongated. We type words with each cluster separated by a space, and words are terminated by a comma (two spaces can't be used, as spaces do not necessarily show up as two spaces on all browsers, unless html tags are used). For example "Lasha Tibet Tokyo Japan" is e2s-mapped as shown.
Of course, very often the spaces between the clusters can be dropped and one may write Tasmeniya in e2s-mapping as Taesme~niya . The spaces have to be retained if the e2s-map is going to be fed to a computer which transcribes it into Sinhala Unicode.
There are sixteen sound forms for a typical consonant.

k ka kae kae~ke ke~ ki ki~ ko ko~ ku ku~ kru kau kng kah
ක් ක කැ කෑකෙ කේ කි කී කො කෝ කු කූ කෘ කෞ ක෦ ක෧





a a~ ae ae~e e~ u u~ iru iru~ ilu ilu~ e e~ ai
අ ආ ඇඈඉඊ උඌ ඍඎඏඐ එඒ ඓ

o o~ au ka kkaga gga nga nga cha ccha ja jja kna gna
ඔ ඕ ඖ ක ඛග ඝ ඞ ඟ ච ඡ ජඣ ඤ ඥ

jna ta ttaDa DDa Na nDa tha ttha d dd na ngd pa ppa
ඦ ට ඨඩඪ ණ ඬ ත ථ ද ධ න ඳ ප ඵ

ba bb ma mbaya rala va sha sa ha La, or LA fa
බ භ ම ඹය රල ව ශ ස හ ළ ෆ

Example
Sinhala Sinhala written with the English keyboard English translation
  • සැමවිටම සිංහල බසින්ම ලිවීමට උත්සාහ කරන ්න.
    විශේෂ හේතුවක් ඇත්නම් පම ණක් ඉංග්‍රී සි බසින් ලිවීම වරදක් නැත.
  • යම් ගැටලුවක් සමූහයට ලිවීමට පෙර, පිළිබඳව මීට පෙර සාකච් ඡා ව ී තිබේදැයි සොයා බලන්න.
  • sae ma, vi Ta ma, si ng ha la, ba si n ma, li vi~ ma ta, u th sa~ ha, ka ra n na.
    vi she~ sha, he~ thu va k, ae th na m, pa ma na k, i ng ri~ si, ba si n, li vi~ ma, va ra da k, nae tha.
  • ya m, gae Ta lu va k, sa mu~ ha ya ta, li vi~ ma ta, pe ra,, e~, pi li ba nda va, mi~ Ta pe ra, sa ka ch cha, vi~, thi be~ dae i, so ya~, ba la n na.
    (The e2s-map with the extra spaces and commas suppressed)
  • saema viTama singhala basinma livi~mata uthsa~ha karanna.
    vishe~sha, he~thuvak, aethnam pamanak ingri~si basin livi~ma varadak naetha.
  • yam gaeTaluvak samu~hayata livi~mata pera, e~ pilibandava mi~Ta pera sakachcha vi~ thibe~daei soya~balanna.
  • Always try to write in sinhala. If there is a special reason, writing in English is no fault.
  • Before writing to the group about some problem, check if there had been discussion about it before.
The English letter clusters can be now trivially converted into Sinhala using the Unicode symbols table. This can be done using a few lines of code to read in the input stream and output the unicode hex-symbol for each cluster.

For other discussions of using an english key board for sinhala, as well as for references to the IT literature, see Osaka and Sri Lanka University study, Goonetilleke et al, 2007