Sinhala Alphabet - Sinhala Transliteration

Sinhala Transliteration

Sinhala transliteration (Sinhala: roma akurin liweema, literally "Roman letter writing) can be done in analogy to Devanāgarī transliteration. A problem is the transliteration of /ඇ/, not found in Devanāgarī. This is <ä> in the German tradition of Wilhelm Geiger, and <æ> in the Anglophone tradition (e.g. James Gair).

Layman's transliterations in Sri Lanka normally follow neither of these. Vowels are transliterated according to English spelling equivalences, which can yield a variety of spellings for a number of phonemes. /iː/ for instance can be , , , , etc.

A transliteration pattern peculiar to Sinhala, and facilitated by the absence of phonemic aspirates, is the use of for the voiceless dental plosive, and the use of for the voiceless retroflex plosive. This is presumably because the retroflex plosive /ʈ/ is perceived the same as the English alveolar plosive /t/, and the Sinhala dental plosive /t̪/ is equated with the English voiceless dental fricative /θ/. Dental and retroflex voiced plosives are alway rendered as , though, presumably because is not found as a representation of /ð/ in English orthography.

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