Mathra (මාත්රා) and the Eight Gana (අෂ්ට ගණ)
A mathra is the time taken to say one short vowel, or a consonant with a short vowel (අ /a/, ක /ka/). A long vowel (ආ, කා) takes two. Each syllable of a name is therefore S short or L long.
The Gana of a name is the S/L pattern of its first three syllables. Four Gana groups are considered auspicious and four inauspicious:
How this app decides S and L
- Short: අ ඇ ඉ උ එ ඔ, and consonants with no sign or with ැ ි ු ෙ ො.
- Long: ආ ඈ ඊ ඌ ඒ ඕ ඓ ඖ, and consonants with ා ෑ ී ූ ේ ෝ ෛ ෞ.
- A hal letter (න්) is not a syllable; it adds ½ mathra and, by classical prosody, makes the syllable before it long (අන්සර → අන්·ස·ර = L S S, Deva). The same applies before a conjunct and to ං / ඃ. Each of these can be switched off under Advanced options, because practitioners differ.
- Names with fewer than three syllables have no Gana and are shown as neutral.
How names are generated
- A small Transformer (decoder-only, trained on Sinhala names one akshara at a time and conditioned on gender and Gana) proposes candidates that start with your letters. It runs entirely in your browser.
- An LLM vets the candidates for pronounceability and gender fit, proposes further meaningful names from Sinhala, Pali and Sanskrit roots, and explains each meaning.
- Every name is then checked by the rule-based Mathra/Gana engine. Only names in the Gana groups you accept are shown, and names found in the known-name list are dropped as not unique.
Meanings of newly coined names are AI suggestions — the confidence level says how sure the model is. For a final choice, confirm with a language expert.
Based on: B.H.S. Nilmini & T.G.I. Fernando, “Developing Recurrent Neural Network Models to Generate New Sinhala-Like Personal Names and Examine Their Gana Effects.”