The ills of Tamil

The author of this rather provocatively titled slim book, an ornithologist by profession and training, is clear about his objective: to draw attention to some of the widely prevalent mistakes in spoken and written Tamil so that the Tamil scholars would join hands in correcting them

Grubh, who has Tamil as his mother tongue, says that, in spite of it being a phonetic language, Tamil has too many discrepancies in pronunciation, and goes on to identify the wrong pronunciation of vowels.

He believes that besides causing confusion in the minds of young learners, the discrepancies make it difficult for foreigners to study the language.

“English is not accessible even to Englishmen” and “…the English have no respect for their language” — George Bernard Shaw in the Preface to Pygmalion, a satire on English language. He says the phonetics varies from street to street in London.

Thousands of dialects exist in the world, and India has several hundreds. Linguists are of the view that the spoken form of the language, or tongue language, developed over a period of more than 5,000 years, and the written form evolved only about 3,000 years ago. The two forms cannot be synchronised fully.

Full report here Hindu