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 | කෑ | කෙ | කේ |
කි | කී |
කො | කෝ | කු | කූ |
කෘ | කෞ |
ක෦ | ක෧ |
The sounds D, T can appear as a soft D, T or hard D, T.
- The hard D, as in disco, will be an upper case D
The soft d, as in The will be a lower case d
- The hard t, as in Tap, will be the upper case T
The soft t, as in Thandori will be a lower case th as this
is more intuitive than t,
but we also accept the latter, i.e., t.
The letters L, N can take two forms
- (palatal:- tha~luja and dental:- danthaja),
- here too we use lower and upper case
to distinguish the two cases (see tables below).
Many consonants have a Hard (mahaapraana) form and a soft from (alpapraana).
- The mahaapraana is indicated in e2s-maps by doubling the letter, e.g.,:
- alpapraana: ප p,
Mahaapraana: ඵ pp;
- alpapraana: ඩ D, Mahaapraana: ඪ DD
- alpapraana: ද d, Mahaapraana: ධ dd
The binduva, Yansaya, R~epya and Rak~ransaya. Sinhala can be written avoiding their
use, as they are effecttively a hang-over from hand-writing.
Read a discussion abut this, and the zero-with joiner, ZWJ.
But they can be easily incorporated in the e2s-map easily, unlike with the sinhala
keyboard.
We use the upper-case letters
G, Y and R to clearly indicate the use of this form of wrting.
- The "binduva", ං , nG is mapped as in "sanGgama", i.e., Sa nG ga ma
සංගම
- The "yansaya" as in VidYa, විද්යා i.e., Vi dYa as opposed to
Vi d ya වි ද් යා which avoids the yansaya.
udyoga (උද්යෝග) or, without the yansya:
උද්යෝග
- That is,
an extra set of sinhala key-board inputs defining the ZWJ (‍)
is needed to write the "yansya", repya or
raka~ra~nsaya, unlike when writing by hand, or when using the e2-map.
- The "Rakaaransaya" as in kRiyava, inputs the letter R following
the current letter i.e, kRi ya~ va. The raka~ra~nshaya is avoided by writing
k ri ya~ va .
- Re~pya inputs the letter R before the current letter, as in vaRshaya,
va Rsha ya .
the re~paya is avoided by writing va r sha ya
a | a~ |
ae | ae~ | e | e~ | u | u~ |
iru | iru~ | ilu | ilu~ | e | e~ |
ai |
අ | ආ |
ඇ | ඈ | ඉ | ඊ |
උ | ඌ |
ඍ | ඎ | ඏ | ඐ |
එ | ඒ |
ඓ |
o | o~ |
au |
ka |
kka | ga | gga | nga |
nga |
cha | ccha | ja | jja | kna | gna |
ඔ | ඕ |
ඖ |
ක |
ඛ | ග | ඝ | ඞ |
ඟ |
ච | ඡ | ජ | ඣ | ඤ |
ඥ |
jna |
ta |
tta | Da | DDa | Na |
nDa |
tha | ttha | d | dd | na | ngd |
pa | ppa |
ඦ |
ට |
ඨ | ඩ | ඪ | ණ |
ඬ |
ත | ථ | ද | ධ | න | ඳ |
ප | ඵ |
ba | bb |
ma | mba | ya | ra | la | va |
sha | sa | ha | La, or LA | fa |
බ | භ |
ම | ඹ | ය | ර | ල | 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.
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- 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.
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(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.
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- 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.
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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
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