Sinhala/1.6

'Pillam' is the Sinhalese word for the symbols, which attach to consonants to make different sounds. There are 14 pillams and each of them has a different name. But We do not need to know their names first. Pillam represents a vowel when it is attached to a consonant and they are always used attached with a consonant only. There are several ways to attach a pillam to a consonant.

Even though We showed you Sinhala consonants as ක, ග, ජ, ච, ට... in the alphabet, those letters were created with a vowel attached to their original/basic type.
 * ක් + අ = ක ________  'ක්' is pronounced as 'ck' in 'Jack'
 * ග් + අ = ග ________   'ග්' is pronounced as 'g' in 'Jug'
 * ජ් + අ = ජ _________   'ජ්' is pronounced as 'ge' in 'Judge'
 * ච් + අ = ච _________    'ච්' is pronounced as 'ch' in 'Catch'
 * ට් + අ = ට _________    'ට්' is pronounced as 't' in 'Rat'

Hope you remember all vowels. Take a look again.

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Letters ඏ and ඐ are not in use at present. So We don't use those letters for further lessons.

Lets see how 14 pillams make different sounds with one letter (ක).

As shown above, You can make different sounds just using pillam instead of vowels with the consonants. You have to use ක, ග, ච, ජ, ට, ඩ, ත, ද, න, ප, බ, භ, ම, ය, ර, ල, ව, ශ, ෂ, ස, හ and ෆ only from all 42 consonants. Other consonants usually don't make different sounds with pillams. Even they make sounds, they are very rarely used in the language.

Lets try.