Singlish Typewriter
Encyclopedia
Sinhala alphabet
The Sinhala alphabet is an abugida used in Sri Lanka to write the official language Sinhala and also sometimes the liturgical languages Pali and Sanskrit...
text on a computer using an English keyboard in English letters. In other words, it is like typewriting Sinhala in English letters but the final result comes in Sinhala letters
Sinhala alphabet
The Sinhala alphabet is an abugida used in Sri Lanka to write the official language Sinhala and also sometimes the liturgical languages Pali and Sanskrit...
.
E.g.
mama = මම
aakaasha = ආකාශ
Because it is a combination of Sinhala and English it is called Singlish, a word built from taking “Sin” from Sinhala and “glish” from English.
Software
There are many software products developed to achieve the Singlish typewriter concept. Some of them come as a separate word processor, while others have made a plug-in or an add-in to many existing word processors. Researches have shown that people does not easily change the word processor they have used for a long time. Therefore the Singlish software those are compatible as a plug-in has been more popular.Development
Singlish is parallel and independently developed by many programmers. Even there are different features and techniques to get the output, the basic concept is to get the Sinhala letters by typing in English letters (input sequence).Known developers of Singlish supported software. (Also see the History of Sinhala Software
History of Sinhala Software
Sinhala language software for computers have been present since the late 1980s but no standard character representation system was put in place which resulted in proprietary character representation systems and fonts...
)
- Dasith Wijesiriwardena (Singlish for SinhalaSP)
- N.P. Vishva Kumara
- A.D.R Sasanka (Natural Singlish)
Methodology
The basic methodology of Singlish parsingParsing
In computer science and linguistics, parsing, or, more formally, syntactic analysis, is the process of analyzing a text, made of a sequence of tokens , to determine its grammatical structure with respect to a given formal grammar...
is to split the input text from English vowels. A single letter in Sinhala when written with English letters ends with a vowel. But this does not occur every time. When the user has entered a text in English letters, the Singlish parser scans through it from the beginning to the end. When it sees a consonant after a vowel it marks between the letters identifying a Sinhala letter. Then it query a reference table to get the Sinhala letter for that set of English letters. The that Sinhala letter is placed to the resulting document