Also, Sri Lankan Tamil sounds significantly closer to the written form (to me). Was it always spoken that way?
On Wed, Aug 20, 2014 at 11:27 PM, Rajesh Mehar <[email protected]> wrote: > Is it the same for Arabic and Chinese as it is for Tamil? I'm not sure. > > I know for Tamil it is a severe paucity of written symbols for the various > sounds in the language. So the same symbol is used to represent the sounds > cha, sa, sha, and ja in the symbol set of the traditional script. More > recently, symbols have been added to 'fill the gap' but they are clearly > demarcated as 'outside sounds'. > > The little I know of the simplified Chinese character set is that it is a > set of 2 dozen or so pictograms that are then combined with each other to > get other pictograms for other sounds. > > I know nothing about the Arabic script. > > Could anyone else elaborate or correct my notions? >
