Sinhala Nouns

Sinhala (Sinhalese) is the majority language of Sri Lanka and is one of the southernmost of the Indian Subcontinent's Indo-Aryan family. It is characterized by round, vowel-rich words and an equally round script that is quite beautiful.

This uses a modification of the transliteration scheme of Fairbanks, Gair and DeSilva and the basic form of the noun (_without_ eka/ekak). 'Ae' and 'aaee' are low front vowels while the inverted e has been transliterated in the middle of words as 'a' and at the end as 'e'. The 'a' in 'father' is written as 'aa'. The basic 'a' is now 'a*'. I've just bypassed words utilizing half nasals for sanity's sake. 'D' and 'T' are spoken with the tongue a little behind their lowercase counterparts 'd' and 't' -- which are dental.

Confused yet? Good. Email your consternation and we'll work a more reasonable system out.