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|iso15924=Sinh }} The Sinhalese alphabet (Sinhala:සිංහල අක්ෂර මාලාව) (Sinhala Akṣara Malava) is an abugida used by the Sinhala people in Sri Lanka and elsewhere to write the Sinhala language and also the liturgical languages Pali and Sanskrit.〔Daniels (1996), p. 408.〕 Being a member of the Brahmic family of scripts, the Sinhalese script can trace its ancestry back more than 2,500 years.〔 Sinhalese is often considered two alphabets, or an alphabet within an alphabet, due to the presence of two sets of letters. The core set, known as the ' (pure Sinhalese, ශුද්ධ සිංහල) or ' ( alphabet එළු හෝඩිය ), can represent all native phonemes. In order to render Sanskrit and Pali words, an extended set, the ' (mixed Sinhalese, මිශ්ර සිංහල), is available.〔Gair and Paolillo 1997: 15f.〕 ==Characteristics== The alphabet is written from left to right. The Sinhalese script is an abugida, as each consonant has an inherent vowel (), which can be changed with the different vowel signs or removed (see image on left for examples). Most of the Sinhalese letters are curlicues; straight lines are almost completely absent from the alphabet. 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. The core set of letters forms the ' alphabet (pure Sinhalese, ශුද්ධ සිංහල), which is a subset of the ' alphabet (mixed Sinhalese, මිශ්ර සිංහල). This "pure" alphabet contains all the graphemes necessary to write (unicode:Eḷu) (classical Sinhalese) as described in the classical grammar (unicode:Sidatsan̆garā) (1300 AD).〔Gair and Paolillo 1997.〕 This is the reason why this set is also called ''(unicode:Eḷu hōdiya)'' ((unicode:"Eḷu alphabet") එළු හෝඩිය). The definition of the two sets is thus a historic one. 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.〔 All native phonemes of the Sinhala spoken today can be represented in ', while in order to render special Sanskrit and Pali sounds, one can fall back on '. This is most notably necessary for the graphemes for the Middle Indic phonemes that the Sinhalese language lost during its history, such as aspirates.〔 Sinhalese had special symbols to represent numerals, which were in use until the beginning of the () century. This system is now superseded by Arabic numerals.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Online edition of Sunday Observer - Business )〕〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Unicode Mail List Archive: Re: Sinhala numerals )〕 Neither the Sinhalese numerals nor U+0DF4 ෴ Sinhalese punctuation kunddaliya is in general use today. The kunddaliya was formerly used as a full stop. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Sinhala alphabet」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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