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In an abugida, each basic character represents a consonant and default vowel. Consonants with a different vowel or bare consonants are represented by adding a modifier character to a base character. Each code point representing a similar phoneme is encoded in the same relative position in each South Asian script block in Unicode, including Tamil.
Tamil phonology is characterised by the presence of "true-subapical" retroflex consonants and multiple rhotic consonants.Its script does not distinguish between voiced and unvoiced consonants; phonetically, voice is assigned depending on a consonant's position in a word, voiced intervocalically and after nasals except when geminated. [1]
Tamil has phonological process by which voiceless plosives are altered to their respective voiced sounds because of their position in a word (word initial versus word medial) or presence of preceding vowel sounds. See Tamil phonology for a more thorough discussion of the sounds of Tamil.
The vowels are called uyir, meaning soul, in Tamil. The consonants are known as mey , meaning body. When the alphasyllabary is formed, the letter shall be taking the form of the consonants, that is the body, and the sound shall be that of the corresponding vowel, that is the soul.
In most of these systems, some consonant-vowel combinations are written as syllables, but others are written as consonant plus vowel. In the case of Old Persian, all vowels were written regardless, so it was effectively a true alphabet despite its syllabic component. In Japanese a similar system plays a minor role in foreign borrowings; for ...
The current Tamil script consists of 12 vowels, 18 consonants and one special character, the Δytam. The vowels and consonants combine to form 216 compound characters, giving a total of 247 characters (12 + 18 + 1 + (12 × 18)). All consonants have an inherent vowel a, as with other Indic scripts.
Otherwise, vowels, vocalics, and part-vowels are written as diacritics attached to consonants. Each consonant in Grantha includes an inherent vowel a, so the letter π , for example, is pronounced ka. Adding a vowel diacritic modifies the vowel sound, so π plus the diacritic π , gives the syllable ππ , ko.
Pallavas developed the Pallava script based on Tamil-Brahmi. The main characteristics of the newer script are aesthetically matched and fuller consonant glyphs, similarly visible in the writing systems of Chalukya, [16] Kadamba, and Vengi at the time of Ikshvakus. Brahmi's design was slightly different from the scripts of Cholas, Pandyas, and ...