Tamil alphabet represents places of articulation. An average linguist, not capable of understanding the ancient scientific methodology in which the alphabet is made to represent the places of articulation and not phonemes, attempts to relate phonemic principles to this original alphabet system. This is caused by the eventual/defector misunderstanding of what an alphabet is and it's implementation as representing randomly selected phonemes by mostly all of the worlds languages.
The meaning of phonemic is "a symbol used to represent differing phonemes". This is applicable to non-structured orthography. Tamil orthography bases itself on the structured places of articulation based scientific model. A particular place of articulation is capable of being manipulated to create very many number of phonemes. So for example the place of articulation "sa" in Tamil is capable of generating sounds not limited to cha, cha, sa, sha, sha, za, nja, nja, but many more sounds. So in day to day usage, Tamil speech generates largest number of phonemes for any language. The point is limited definition of "phonemic" does not accurately reflects the structured nature of a symbol. The terminology "phonemic" is not the correct one to represent this phenomenon. A proper description of this structured nature of places of articulation as alphabet need to be understood and an appropriate international terminology to define such properties are yet to be looked into by linguists. While doing this, the mechanics of generating sounds, during speech, as defined by Tamil grammar Tholharpiyam need to be taken note of. Regards Sinnathurai Note: Phoneme: any one of the set of smallest units of speech in a language that distinguish one word from another. In English, the /s/ in sip and the /z/ in zip represent two different phonemes. Phonimic: *2.* (Linguistics / Phonetics & Phonology) relating to or denoting speech sounds that belong to different phonemes rather than being allophonic variants of the same phoneme Compare phonetic<http://www.thefreedictionary.com/phonetic>[2]
