Dear Max, <Ignore the previous mail, as replied to aan earlier mail>
Exactly, Consonants: Base is 6 characters/alphabet or 7 as v/p ka, sa, da, tha, pa, ra, nasal of the above is nga, nja, na, ma, Na, na and fricative like (I'll translate this soon) ya, ra, la, va, lza, La (example, v,v,w,f,etc..) exactcly, 5 vowels a, i, u, e, o then there are timing selected (not phonemes) aa, ii, uu, ee, oo Unlike, consonants never combine, vowels do combine and form shorter duration exceptions, ai, au as characters also there are near-viceless timing for vowels (kuRRiyal) aslo there are elongate the timing of vowels as much as needed (needdin kuuddi) ex, iiiiiiiiiii, ooooooooo, eeeeeeeeee, etc.... note: nasals: add to existing PoAs. fricative likes: the mechanism changes to create sound. Sinnathurai --- On Mon, 29/11/10, maxwell <[email protected]> wrote: From: maxwell <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [indic] Re: Revisit Tamil sRi definition in Unicode. To: "Sinnathurai Srivas" <[email protected]> Date: Monday, 29 November, 2010, 21:02 On Mon, 29 Nov 2010 10:55:24 -0800 (PST), Sinnathurai Srivas <[email protected]> wrote: > I can stress that Tamil alphabet only represents PoAs and not phonemes. If that were the case, the Tamil alphabet would consist of six letters, since that's the number of points of articulation there are in Tamil: labial, dental/alveolar, retroflex, palatal, velar, and glottal. If you wanted to claim that each combination of vowel height + backness was an additional point of articulation (which is not standard linguistic terminology), you could add five more letters to Tamil, for a total of eleven. And as I've said before, if the Tamil alphabet represented only points of articulation (as this term is used in English), then there would be no distinction between ப் (/p/) and ம் (/m/), since these two phonemes have the same point of articulation, namely labial; nor among த் (/t/), ந் (/n/), ர் (/ɾ/), and ல் (/l/), since these phonemes are all at the alveolar/ dental point of articulation. Mike Maxwell
