[Drugmachine]

When English,chinese,Japanese, Arab and even hindi people never want the sounds of their language distorted why you all want to change the tamil sounds. I don't know.

Hindi cannot include the sound 'Lzha' used in tamil and malayalam. Do you want the sound letter to be included in Hindi?

There is one Jackieshan film. He goes to America. A receiver black American got irritation over jackies' english. Jackie continued his own chinean phonetical style: But done his job worthfully. The black american impressed and got sad while they are parting at the end of the movie stroryline.

Hence result is essential than the unnecessary changes.

There is one word in Japan 'KAIJEN' which means 'Change for good'. Hence change for good, men! not for unneedy one. okay!

[softy54534]

Instead of adding new letters, we can use the existing letters to get those pronounciation for instance we could use Aytha elutu 'ak'in conjunction with others
ak + ka = Gha
ak + ka = Nha
ak + pa = Bha
ak + pu = Bu/bhu
is + ak = ish
etc
this way we maintain our basic structure and can still pronounce all other languages.

[Beerinkol]

This was my response on another thread, when a similar discussion came about.

Srini,

I don't have any strong opinion either way, on expanding the character set for the Tamizh script.

'pirAnsu' for France shouldn't be a problem, since they call us 'Tamoules' and India as 'Inde'. After all each language has it's own rules on morphhology and the Tamil rules are such that we try to avoid consonantal clusters, unlike Samaskirutam, which could become Samskrtm in Sanskrit. And then of course we do not want to have 'fa', so substitute 'pa' to form 'pirAnsu'. So even if we had 'fa', we would still call it 'firAnsu'.

Thanjavur was called 'Tanjore', Tiruvananthapuram as 'Trivandrum', Thuthukudi as 'Tuticorin', Tiruchirappalli as 'Trichinopoly' and so forth by the British and we Tamizhs and other Indians did not, and some still do not, have a problem in using the anglicised version of the names. Nobody ridicules the English or the French or anyone else for mangling proper nouns from other languages and I think we should not self-flagellate ourselves over these things.

If the idea is to avoid the ignominy of being termed 'copy cats'....

I don't think the resistance is due to 'not invented here syndrome'.


Is our perception of our own mother tongue so weak that adoption of extra characters would tantamount to proclaiming our inadequacy ?

Is it really that blasphemous to think of including newer characters into our Script?


On the contrary, it is not a perception of inadequacy, but an attempt to retain the uniqueness of the language and to keep it pristine and close to it's original form, the template to original harking back at least to the Eluttatikaram of TolkAppiyam.

Nothing blasphemous about including new characters and as history shows, it was done with the Grantham script. In present day society, when there is a wholesale mental buyin (especially by the elite) to the concept of learning English for advancement and aangila kalappu in everyday speech to boot, the defenses are up to preserve the purity of the language, since the culture is bound up with the language. We all know that most Indian languages including Tamizh are given to diglossia, where you have a pure, literary sentamizh as opposed to the koduntamizh of everyday speech and writing. Adding characters to the script entails pitfalls and dangers of taking down the walls of literary Tamizh, so to speak, and allowing the marauders to conquer the fort. The fear is that the Tamizh culture of antiquity will be subsumed into a pan-Indian culture and it's uniqueness appropriated by a northern elite or their sympathizers within Tamil Nadu into an all encompassing 'Samaskruta, Vedic culture', which has come to be narrowly identified with certain groups. So in order to maintain cultural cohesiveness, the regulation of the literary (H-level as linguists call it) language is strict and adding characters to the script is considered a major change. The gains from adding the extra characters are not very clear as the evolution of English into a major language despite its flawed character set (Roman alphabet) shows.

As Tamizh society evolves people may revisit the need to add more characters, depending on the needs of the future. But I don't see that happening in our lifetimes from my present vantage point and I don't consider that a negative either.

If people want to advance and if they think English or any other language is the ticket, they will put in the efforts to learn the language and the right pronunciations and sounds too! So I don't subscribe to your statement that It is this straightjacket interpretation of Tamil which causes palpable damage to a Tamil professional when he wants to communicate with a non-Tamil audience. Why should a true professional concern oneself with the language and accent of delivery rather than the content of what is said? In this, we Tamizhs and Indians have a long way to go, to free our minds.

For more, check this thread: http://forumhub.com/tnhistory/22693.21.33.27.html

If you are further interested, you may look at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tamil_araichchi/

[Ifroham4]

Bringing foreign sound into tamil and changing the sound is the same.

But no-one's talking about bringing the sounds into Tamil, or borrowing those words into Tamil as loanwords. Just a better system to write foreign names and such things in Tamil. There are a number of diacritics one can use with the English script to indicate Tamil sounds like: "āṅkilattil eḻutamuṭiym". This is not weakening the language, nor is it changing the way English is written or spoken. It just makes it easier to transcribe foreign languages into English. Why will things be different with Tamil?

[Big A]

one thing is clear ! everybody agreed that THAMIZHL didnot have gh/f/j/x/z/ss/sh/... and other such consonants .
THAT MEANS THAMIZHL IS ETIMOLOGICALLY MORE PRIMITIVE TO OTHER INDIAN AND WORLD LANGUAGES AND
THAT MEANS THAMIZH PREDATES ANY SPOKEN LANGUAGE, i.e., THAMIZH IS ONE OF THE OLDEST LANUAGE SPOKEN EVER ON THIS EARTH!!!! older than all languages which has the above mentioned difficult to pronounce unnatural consonants and syllables-like SANSKRIT, LATIN, ARABIC, AND GREEK,...
THANKYOU FOR THE ENLIGHTENMENT;
THE TRUTH WAS GLARING AT ME!!!!

[Fegasderty]

Mani,
Your suggestin is good, but, two problems. Malayalam kha looks like va and Malayalam tha(aspirated) looks like Tamil ma. How would a person differentiate kha from va and tha(aspirated) from ma?

[S.T.D.]

venki,

"..The gains from adding the extra characters are not very clear as the evolution of English into a major language despite its flawed character set (Roman alphabet) shows."

No one said English is an adequate language. You missed the point. England emerged as a world power two hundred years ago becuase of its Industrial development. English language has only five vowels and it is not phonetic. You have to memorise the spelling of each word and it is hard to pronounce like a native speaker. Dr. Henry Kissenger came to US as a 14 year old, and 65 years later he still have problem pronouncing the words even though he taught at Harvard. How many times yoiu hear educated people on TV saying they don't know how to spell. Chinese children take 10 years before they feel confident to spell thier characters. Telugu, Tamil and other Indian languages are phonetic base and we don't memorise the spelling. We pronounce and write the words the same way. Tamil is missing two or three base consonants like 'ga'. Telugu added two many hard consonants to accomodate Sanskrit sounds which I would like to eliminate. Earlier I said, language and script are two different things. You said Tamil script borrowed letters from Grantham earlier. Adding few more base consonants make Tamil easy to spell, and easy to accomodate into future technology such as speech-to-text. There will be scholors who will tell how some spelling changed and how to read TolkAppiyam.

[Lillie_Steins]

Skanthavelu Nadarajah,

"Why not add letters to thamizh for the samaskrudham letters, ru, krt, thru, pru, mru etc.."

First they all contractions of two consonants and there is no need to have separate charecters. Second we should modify sanskrit sounds to tamil by removing 'r' sound. This is what pali did 2500 years ago. Ordinary telugu and Tamils pronounce 'pranalika' as 'panalika'. This will make Dravidian languages sound more natural. No language should add foreign sounding letters and burden the native speakers. If English with 26 letters can serve, Tamil with 50+ letters can do the same with the exception of couple base consonants I mentioned earlier.

[Drugmachine]

I just happened to come across this thread.

In this context i recollect one of my Tamil Vaathiyars telling me about the now-obsolete Ayutha ezhutthu during my school/college days.

He said, 'the main use of this letter was to differentiate the ka-kha, Ga-Gha, cha-chha etc. and these stronger kha,gha,cha were all basically combinations of ka+aha, ga+aha.....'

He also added that the Hindi/Sanskrit 'Am' was also indicated by the use of this letter.

He reasoned that
'the form of this letter is a combination of the dots used in the Hindi/Sanskrit letters 'Am' and 'Aha'....and thamizh didn't use Aa+m(indicated by a dot on top) or Aa+h(indicated by two dots on the side) as in sanskrit but combined them as one as 'Ah+Am' which became 'Ahdham' and then 'Ayudham''

'the letter was not to be used in its original form as we know it today, but only in combination....'

'the usage of the letter went out of fashion as it was difficult to use a dot on the palm leaves....'

Can anyone throw more light on this......?

[MannoFr]

Topic started by p~n (@ bgp385601bgs.jersyc01.nj.comcast.net) on Thu May 1 21:20:37 .


Tamil doesn't have signs for /kha/, /ga/, /gha/, /cha/, /jha/, /da/, /dha/, /tha/, /pha/, /ba/, /bha/ (I haven't included everything, there's more) that is found in most other Indian languages - Telugu, Malayalam, Hindi, Bengali etc. The same letter takes diff sounds in various positions, which only a native speaker can be perfect. Don't you think this makes the language deficient and makes it difficult to learn? It also poses problems to Tamilians willing to learn other Indian languages, I have gone thru these phases and also come across many ppl with these complaints.

Thanks to borrowed 'Grantha' signs - we today are capable of writing most names e.g., Mahesh, Sriram, Rajan, Saraswathi, Christian names like Stanley, John, Muslim names like Hassan, Jaffar, etc...I dread to think otherwise..

Hindi also has some missing signs - short /e/, short /o/, but much less compared to Tamil. In the past, when Tamilians were strictly confined to TN, it was never a problem. That doesn't hold good anymore, in this internet age, where there is lot of cultural interchange.

Can't we add a few more new letters, derived from older ones, that wud make the language more effective, powerful and modern...Grantha letters have been added, few signs have been removed and new ones added to facilitate type-writing, Why can't we come up with some letters to enrich the language? (I'm neither a linguist nor a Scholar, just someone who has some thoughts to improve the lang to suit the present scenario)..Views please..

[Raj_Copi_Jin]

In "Pohi', before pongal day all old palm leaves of Brahmi script were put into fire when uneducated old people lived near tamil temples made that pohi practice. Agathiyam and other 6000 years old tamil literature perished in that way. Now a part of kundalakesi,valayapathi is only available.

I read about this in U Ve Swaminathan's autobiography. I found it really hard to fathom how the people could have thought they were doing the right and sensible thing.

[Raj_Copi_Jin]

>>Where should we get the missing letters from? Well, as told by Mani, we cud pick them from our neighbor Malayalam, but, I'm sure Tamil scholars would frown on this suggestion. The wall of ego would prevent us from borrowing letters from a language like Malayalam, much younger to Tamil.

[Drugmachine]

Bringing foreign sound into tamil and changing the sound is the same.

When you have employment oppurtunity, science development, inventions,discoveries in tamil ,tamil will live. otherwise it will die.

If inventions & discoveries are more in tamil then tamil sound will be used by others.

The receivability of tamil from the latest development is one of the best in India. But the usage,business transaction is very less in tamil. The geographical and political set up of tamil in India is like this. Hence, Tamil will die slowly.

[NeroASERCH]

p~n,

"If things continue the same way they are now, Tamil, inspite of its glorious, rich literary past, wud die a natural death, eaten up by English and Hindi, the languages of power and politics (in India). "

Till 1990s, people in US were using phones for communication and letter writing was disappearing. Many collage students could not write a simple letter. Every body was worried. Then came the Email revolution, now every body is an author. This can also happen to Tamil. The Indian languages are very efficient to write with hand but are not suited for automation. Twenty-five years ago I started to simplify Telugu by droppng many hard consonants and writing vowels on the side like English. I have two rules, one for vowels and the other for stressed consonants. The Unicode consortium allocated 128 charecters for each Indian language. Microsoft implented Indic languages in Windows XP, now you can use tamil in Winword. They introduced a Input Exit Method(IME) for Indic languages, every time you hit a consosonant followed by vowel, the IME will take over and translate into a compound charecter. For example: If you enter 'k' follwed by 'a', it will display 'ka', as a compound construct. Every time we display or print, it has to go thru this translation. It will also create a problem in sorting in alphabetical order. I suggested to Microsoft to disable the IME, and let us write side by side like English. It may look little odd but we are still using our chracter set. With this change, we can use Tamil, Telugu in emails, word processors, Databases etc. When the language usage increases, langugae will grow and will never die.

[Drugmachine]

Great Venki! You said it!

[Lillie_Steins]

What is wrong about making changes that expand the sounds we can pronounce:

I want to write George Bush in a way that, even if my reader doesn't know the name he will read iot right. Not as Saarchchu Bus.

Ironicaly 'Bus' is better written in Tamil than English, we need to figure a way around that too

From the 12th century up to around the 19th century, Tamils used to have a rather interesting way of writing when the subject matter required them to use a lot of Sanskrit words. They used to in effect write using both the Grantham script (which was basically a different script, with some letters similar to Tamil and others different, which Tamils used to write Sanskrit) and the normal Tamil vattezhuthu. If, therefore, they had to write the phrase "tirumaalin kamalanayangal", they would write 'tirumaalin' in the vattezhuthu, "kamalanayana" in the Grantha script, and "ngal" in the vattezhuthu. I have an old copy of a commentary on a portion of the amarakosha in Tamil, and they use this system. It works very well.

So an interesting solution to the problem, which may be a middle way, will be to readopt this system. We take the old Grantham script, and add a few letters to it to represent sounds which we need today, but which Sanskrit doesn't have (like "f", the flat "ö", the rounded "å", the flat "ä" or "æ", and so on). We then use it together with the Tamil vattezhuthu, just as was done when using Sanskrit words with Tamil.

[Beerinkol]

By the same token, we might have to start demanding for changes in English to take care of basic 'deficiencies' like a missing 'aa', etc.,

[Paul Bunyan]

Mani,
If Malayalam letters were added from Malayalam into Tamil script, the Tamil alphabet would look so different.

For the Ri/Ruh sound as in Krishna, the Malayalam letter for that sound can be used. For the two letters kha and tha(aspirated) which I pointed out yesterday, the Grantha letters for those sounds can be used(Or Malayalam va can be used for kha in Tamil). For the other sounds, (ga, gha, chha, jha, Tha, Da, Dha, dha, dha(aspirated), pha, ba, bha and gya), the Malayalam letters for those sounds can be used. I agree the ja in Tamil and Malayalam is beautiful. It is so reminiscent in shape of a butterfly.

[Peptobismol]

When English,chinese,Japanese, Arab and even hindi people never want the sounds of their language distorted why you all want to change the tamil sounds. I don't know.

The point is not to change the Tamil sounds. The point is to devise a way of writing foreign sounds in Tamil without changing the foreign sound. For example, transcribing the international system of Linnaean taxonomy into Tamil accurately and unambiguously is very difficult at the moment. Why not find a way to do it?

And I am not suggesting anything which is alien to Tamil tradition - we used to do exactly this when dealing with foreign languages. We even invented a completely different script for the purpose. All I am suggesting is that we revive this tradition and script.

You said elsewhere: "Tamil is perishing and after 50 years its existance in India is ruled out." I disagree, and that is why I would like to see Tamil capitalise on its own strengths.

[softy54534]

Skanthane,

>>If Malayalam letters were added from Malayalam into Tamil script, the Tamil alphabet would look so different.