Tamil phonology

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Main article: Tamil language

The Tamil alphabet distinguishes 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.

A Tamil tongue twister

The sentence literally means: "A poor old man slipped on a banana peel and fell sprawling."

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1 Vowels
2 Consonants
3 Phonology
- 3.1 Elision
4 References
5 Bibliography

[edit] 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.

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

Monophthongs^[1]
	Front		Central		Back
	long	short	long	short	long	short
Close	iː	i			uː	u
Mid	eː	e			oː	o
Open			aː	a

Tamil has two diphthongs /aj/ and /aw/, the latter of which is restricted to a few lexical items.

[edit] Consonants

The consonants are known as mey ezhuttu (mey-body, ezhuttu-letters).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.

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

Tamil consonants^[2]
	Labial	Dental Alveolar	Retroflex	Postalveolar Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal	m	n	ɳ	(ɲ)
Plosive	p (b)	t̪ (d̪)	ʈ (ɖ)		k (g)
Affricate			tʃ (dʒ)
Fricative	(f)¹	s (z)¹	(ʂ)²			(h)² (ɦ)³
Tap		ɾ
Approximant	ʋ		ɻ	j
Lateral approximant		l	ɭ

/f/ and /z/ are peripheral to the phonology of Tamil, being found only in loanwords and frequently replaced by native sounds.
/ʂ/ and /h/ are not Tamil phonemes but may be represented with Grantha letters.
[ɦ] is a possible allophone of /k/

[edit] 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 as allophones--i.e., they are in complementary distribution and the places they can occur do not intersect. For example, the unvoiced plosive 'p' occurs at the beginning of the words and the voiced plosive 'b' cannot. In the middle of words, unvoiced plosives commonly occur as a geminated pair like -pp- , while voiced plosives do not usually come in pairs. Only the voiced plosives occur after a vowel, or after a corresponding nasal. Thus both the voiced and unvoiced plosives can be represented by the same script in Tamil without ambiguity, the script denoting only the place and broad manner of articulation (plosive, nasal, etc.). 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.

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 pronouncing 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.

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.

[edit] 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.

1.	Kutriyalukaram	the vowel u
2.	Kutriyalikaram	the vowel i
3.	Aiykaarakkurukkam	the diphthong ai
4.	Oukaarakkurukkam	the diphthong au
5.	Aaythakkurukkam	the special character akh (aaytham)
6.	Makarakkurukkam	the phoneme m