Āytam

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Akh
Akh

Āytam is a special sound in the Tamil Language. It is represented in the Tamil script by the character ஃ. It is special in the senses of not being an independent sound and being archaic and employed only in idiomatic and fossilized words such as அஃது, இஃது etc. It is pronounced as agkh in the former and igkh in the latter.

The sound āytam is mentioned in the earliest available Tamil grammatical treatise Tolkāppiyam (1:1:2) where it is categorized as a Dependent Sound (or cārpezuttu). As stated by Krishnamurti (Krishnamurti:2003 p154 [1] ) "The properties of āytam, as described by Tolkāppiyam, were: (1) it occurred after a short vowel and before a stop (voiceless), and its place of articulation is like that of the stop. In other words, ... assimilates to the following voiceless stop".

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  1. ^ Krishnamurti, Bhadriraju (2003). The Dravidian Languages, Cambridge Language Surveys. Cambridge University Press, 140. ISBN 0521771110. 

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