Characteristics
The alphabet is written from left to right. The Sinhalese script is an abugida, as each consonant has an inherent vowel (/a/), which can be changed with the different vowel signs (see image on left).
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 śuddha siṃhala alphabet (pure Sinhalese, ශුද්ධ සිංහලimg), which is a subset of the miśra siṃhala alphabet (mixed Sinhalese, මිශ්ර සිංහලimg). This "pure" alphabet contains all the graphemes necessary to write Eḷu (classical Sinhalese) as described in the classical grammar Sidatsan̆garā (1300 AD). This is the reason why this set is also called Eḷu hōdiya ("Eḷu alphabet" එළු හෝඩියimg).
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 śuddha, while in order to render special Sanskrit and Pali sounds, one can fall back on miśra siṃhala. 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 This system is now superseded by Arabic numerals.
Neither the Sinhalese numerals nor U+0DF4 ෴ Sinhalese punctuation kunddaliya is in general use today. The kunddaliya was formerly used as a full stop; it is included for scholarly use. The Sinhalese numerals are not presently encoded.
Read more about this topic: Sinhala Alphabet