Hinthi With Tamil Languages Book In Series Of Reforms

Thus the character k, for example, represents k but can also be pronounced g or x based on the rules of Tamil grammar.

For the distinction between, and, see IPA Brackets and transcription delimiters.

Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks or boxes, misplaced vowels or missing conjuncts instead of Indic text.

Tamil text used in this article is transliterated into the Latin script according to the ISO 15919 standard.

The complete script, therefore, consists of the 31 letters in their independent form and an additional 216 combinant letters, for a total of 247 (12182161) combinations (, uyirmeyyeuttu, soul-body-letters) of a consonant and a vowel, a mute consonant or a vowel alone.

The combinant letters are formed by adding a vowel marker to the consonant.

Some vowels require the basic shape of the consonant to be altered in a way that is specific to that vowel.

Others are written by adding a vowel-specific suffix to the consonant, yet others a prefix and still other vowels require adding both a prefix and a suffix to the consonant.

In every case, the vowel marker is different from the standalone character for the vowel.

The script used by such inscriptions is commonly known as the Tamil-Brahmi or Tamili script and differs in many ways from standard Ashokan Brahmi.

For example, early Tamil-Brahmi, unlike Ashokan Brahmi, had a system to distinguish between pure consonants ( m, in this example) and consonants with an inherent vowel ( ma, in this example).

In addition, according to Iravatham Mahadevan, early Tamil Brahmi used slightly different vowel markers, had extra characters to represent letters not found in Sanskrit and omitted letters for sounds not present in Tamil such as voiced consonants and aspirates.

Inscriptions from the 2nd century use a later form of Tamil-Brahmi, which is substantially similar to the writing system described in the Tolkppiyam, an ancient Tamil grammar.

Most notably, they used the pui to suppress the inherent vowel.

The Tamil letters thereafter evolved towards a more rounded form and by the 5th or 6th century, they had reached a form called the early vaeuttu.

By the 8th century, the new scripts supplanted Vaeuttu in the Chola resp.

Pallava kingdoms which lay in the north portion of the Tamil-speaking region.

However, Vaeuttu continued to be used in the southern portion of the Tamil-speaking region, in the Chera and Pandyan kingdoms until the 11th century, when the Pandyan kingdom was conquered by the Cholas.

Over the next few centuries, the Chola-Pallava script evolved into the modern Tamil script.

The use of palm leaves as the primary medium for writing led to changes in the script.

The scribe had to be careful not to pierce the leaves with the stylus while writing because a leaf with a hole was more likely to tear and decay faster.

As a result, the use of the pui to distinguish pure consonants became rare, with pure consonants usually being written as if the inherent vowel were present.

Similarly, the vowel marker for the kuiyal ukaram, a half-rounded u which occurs at the end of some words and in the medial position in certain compound words, also fell out of use and was replaced by the marker for the simple u.

The pui did not fully reappear until the introduction of printing, but the marker kuiyal ukaram never came back into use although the sound itself still exists and plays an important role in Tamil prosody.

Hinthi With Tamil Languages Book In Series Of Reforms

In the 20th century, the script was simplified even further in a series of reforms, which regularised the vowel markers used with consonants by eliminating special markers and most irregular forms.

Unlike every other Brahmic script, it does not regularly represent voiced or aspirated stop consonants as these are not phonemes of the Tamil language even though voiced and fricative allophones of stops do appear in spoken Tamil.

Hinthi With Tamil Languages Book In Pdf