Tamil language

Sounds

The Tamil alphabet has 12 vowels and 18 consonants. These combine to form 216 compound characters. There is one special character (aaytha ezutthu), giving a total of 247 characters.

Related Topics:
Alphabet - Vowel - Consonant

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Vowels

The vowels are called uyir ezhuthu (uyir - life, ezhuthu - letter). The vowels are classified into short and long (five of each type) and two diphthongs.

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The long (nedil) vowels are about twice as long as the short (kuRil) vowels. The diphthongs are usually pronounced about 1.5 times as long as the short vowels, though most grammatical texts place them with the long vowels.

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The diphthongs of Tamil are

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:ai

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:au

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The vowels {{IPA|/?/}}, {{IPA|/æ?/}}, and {{IPA|/??/}} are peripheral to the phonology of Tamil, occurring only in loanwords.

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Consonants

The consonants are classified into three categories with six in each category: vallinam - hard, mellinam - soft or nasal, and idayinam - medium. Tamil has very restricted consonant clusters (eg: never word initial etc.) and has neither aspirated nor voiced stops. Some scholars have suggested that in Chenthamil (which refers to Tamil as it existed before Sanskrit words were borrowed), stops were voiceless when at the start of a word and voiced allophonically otherwise. However, no such distinction is observed by most modern Tamil speakers.

Related Topics:
Consonant - Nasal - Stops - Sanskrit - Allophonically

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A chart of the Tamil consonant phonemes in the International Phonetic Alphabet follows:

Related Topics:
Phoneme - International Phonetic Alphabet

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The sounds {{IPA|/b/, /d?/, /?/, /?/, /g/, /f/, /?/, /?/, /x/}} are peripheral to the phonology of Tamil, being found only in loanwords and frequently replaced by native sounds.

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Special character

The special character 'ஃ' (pronounced 'akh') is called āytham in the Tolkāppiyam (see Tolkāppiyam 1:1:2). The āytham is rarely used by itself: it normally serves a purely grammatical function as an independent vowel form, the equivalent of the overdot diacritic of plain consonants. The rules of pronunciation given in the Tolkāppiyam suggest that the āytham could have glottalised the sounds it was combined with. Although the character was common in classical Tamil, it fell out of use in the early modern period and is now very rare in written Tamil. It is occasionally used with a 'p' (as {{unicode|ஃப}}) to represent the phoneme .

Related Topics:
Overdot diacritic - Glottalised

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The āytham is also called ahenam (literally, 'the "ah" sound'). Its resemblance to the three dots that were found on shields in mediaeval times, and the similarity of the name āytham to the word āyutham meaning 'weapon' or 'tool' has resulted in it often being called āyutha ezhuthu (literally, 'the war-weapon letter').

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Many researchers now feel that the āytham is actually used to represent the voiced implosive (or closing part or the first half) of geminated voiced plosives inside a word. For example, a word written as 'mu-āytham-dee-dhu' (from MuLL+dheedhu) should be read as 'muddeedhu' (MuLL+dheedhu). (This derivation is in accordance with the pu?arci rules for agglutination in Tamil.) Thus the letter doesn't have a unique pronunciation ('akh') as commonly believed, but takes its pronunciation from the succeeding plosive in the word. Thus it doesn't have a separate place of origin in the oral cavity on its own, it shares the place of origin of the succeeding plosive. This is the reason why Tolkaappiyam calls it a 'Saarbezhuthu' (a dependent letter/sound).

Related Topics:
Voiced implosive - Derivation - Pu?arci - Agglutination - Tolkaappiyam

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Phonology

Unlike most other Indian languages, Tamil does not have aspirated consonants. The Tamil script does not have distinct letters for voiced and unvoiced plosives, although both are present in the spoken language. Voiced and unvoiced plosives are indeed allophones. They infact form, complementary distribution by not occuring at each other's place. For example, the unvoiced plosive 'p'occurs at the beginning of the words and the voiced plosive 'b' doesn't occur at that place.Inside words,only unvoiced plosives occur commonly as geminated pair like -pp- , but voiced plosives usually don't come as pairs.The voiced plosive 'b' comes after corresponding nasal'm' but the unvoiced plosive doesn't come so. The voiced plosive comes after a vowel but the unvoiced doesn't come so.Thus both the voiced and unvoiced plosives can be represented by the same script in Tamil,script denoting only the place of origin of sound in oral cavity and also whether the sound is plosive or nasal or another.Voiced or unvoiced being determined by the context. The Tolkāppiyam cites detailed rules as to when a letter is to be pronounced with voice and when it is to be pronounced unvoiced. The rule is identical for all plosives.

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With the exception of one rule - the pronunciation of the letter c at the beginning of a word - these rules are largely followed even today in pronuncing centamil. The position is, however, much more complex in relation to spoken koduntamil. The pronunciation of southern dialects and the dialects of Sri Lanka continues to reflect these rules to a large extent, though not completely. In northern dialects, however, sound shifts have changed many words so substantially that these rules no longer describe how words are pronounced. In addition many, but not all, Sanskrit loan words are pronounced in Tamil as they were in Sanskrit, even if this means that consonants which should be unvoiced according to the Tolkāppiyam are voiced.

Related Topics:
Sri Lanka - Sanskrit - Loan word

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Phonologists are divided in their opinion over why written Tamil did not distinguish between voiced and unvoiced characters. One point of view is that Tamil never had conjunct consonants or voiced stops - voice was rather the result of elision or sandhi. Consequently unlike Indo-European languages and other Dravidian languages, Tamil did not need separate characters for voiced consonants. A slightly different theory holds that voiced consonants were at one stage allophones of unvoiced consonants, and the lack of distinction between the two in the modern script merely reflects that.

Related Topics:
Phonologists - Conjunct consonant - Stops - Elision - Sandhi - Indo-European languages - Dravidian languages

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Elision

Elision is the reduction in the duration of sound of a phoneme when preceded by or followed by certain other sounds. There are well-defined rules for elision in Tamil. They are categorised into different classes based on the phoneme which undergoes elision.

Related Topics:
Elision - Phoneme

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• Kutriyalukaram - the vowel u
• Kutriyalikaram - the vowel i
• Aiykaarakkurukkam - the diphthong ai
• Oukaarakkurukkam - the diphthong au
• Aaythakkurukkam - the special character akh (aaytham)
• Makarakkurukkam - the phoneme m