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There are 12 vowels in Sinhala. Six of which are short vowels, six are long vowels (their duration lasts a longer period of time). There are 35 consonants. In Sinhala, each consonantal letter represents a syllable rather than an individual sound. For example, න represents "nuh" not "nnn" as our letter "N" does in English. To turn the English "N" into a syllable, vowels have to be added to the consonant (in this case, "uh"). That is not true in Sinhala. Each letter represents a syllable. To create syllables that end in vowels besides "uh", one must mark the letter using letter modifiers. There is a modifier corresponding to each of the 12 vowels. Keep in mind: these modifiers are only used to change the vowels following a consonant. If the vowel is at the beginning of the word, use the vowel described in the vowel page. Vowels within a word are expressed through the use of a diacritic.(For example, the "aah" sound in "ayubowan" [ආයුබොවන්] is spelled with ආ because it is at the beginning of a word. However, the "aah" sound in "yaamata" [යාමට] is written as a modifier to the consonant ය.) |
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