Dear Michael,
It is better if you do do some research before commenting.
you say Tamil has 10 vowels.
No Tamil has 5 basic PoA for generating vowels.
then it has 5 of double matrai (not matra) matrai is to do with
momental-timin!!!
then it has grammar rule to extend vowel timing further, which UC already
denied for Tamil
sample phonemes from the basic 5 starts with 2 major variants (there are
much more) .
ie 10 sounds, with your 10 sounds = 20 sounds. actually 10 major vowel
phonemes
if you can see the colours below. .
a as in undo ---------amma ----அம்மா
a as in apple ------- annai -----அன்னை
i as in ---????--------intru------இன்று
i as in India -----------India------இந்தியா
u as in book ---------udu--------உடு
u as in queen--------uyil--------உயில்
e as in ????--------eN--------எண்
e as in egg-----------en---------என்
The above are from 5 basics.
If you count your 10 basics it will double.
and there are many more variations and we need to agree on easily graspable
basics before going any further.
As for consonants, Tamil uses far more phonemes than any other language in
the world..
It is good to learn before nooping, please!!!
Regards
Sinnathurai
On 9 February 2012 19:49, Michael Everson <everson_at_evertype.com> wrote:
> On 9 Feb 2012, at 11:34, Sinnathurai Srivas wrote:
>
> > To my knowledge, in day to day usage Tamil uses far more sounds than any
> language in the world.
>
> Nope.
>
> > So Tamil uses far more phoneme for any language.
>
> Sorry, but this simply isn't true. For instance Tamil has 10 vowels [iː ɪ
> eː ɛ uː ʊ oː ɔ aː ə], but RP English has 12, and Australian English has 14.
> Tsez for instance has 31 consonant phonemes; Tamil has 14, though some more
> if you count foreign borrowed sounds and some allophones. It would be easy
> to find more examples of languages with many vowels and many consonants.
>
> > Most importantly to my knowledge, only Tamil grammar that defines what
> is alphabet and how to use them.
>
> Tamil can be written in Latin and Devanagari and other scripts, if one
> wants to transliterate it.
>
> I'm not going to comment more on this, but you might consider doing some
> research on linguistic diversity before making the kinds of claims you are
> making about Tamil.
>
> Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
>
>
>
>
Received on Thu Feb 09 2012 - 15:53:49 CST
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Thu Feb 09 2012 - 15:53:52 CST