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The Tamil script also lacks distinct letters for voiced and unvoiced stops as their pronunciations depend on their location in a word. For example, the voiceless stop [p] occurs at the beginning of words while the voiced stop [b] cannot. In the middle of words, voiceless stops commonly occur as a geminated pair like -pp-, while voiced stops do ...
This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Tamil on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Tamil in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them.
Instead of writing like in modern days without any markers, for example (Tamil: அது, romanized: Atu), it was written with a preceding ஃ, like – Tamil: அஃது, romanized: Aḥtu. Another archaic Tamil letter ஂ, represented by a small hollow circle and called Aṉuvara, is the Anusvara.
In Tamil, a single letter standing alone or multiple letters combined form a word. Tamil is an agglutinative language – words consist of a lexical root to which one or more affixes are attached. Most Tamil affixes are suffixes .
There are clear rules as to what letters can and can not come as the first letter of a word used in Tamil, how long (the duration) each Tamil letter is to be pronounced and when they get shortened by half or by one quarter etc. Native speaker with a basic grounding in the language know these without elaborate rules.
Some letters are modified with diacritics: Long vowels are marked with an overline (often called a macron). Vocalic (syllabic) consonants, retroflexes and ṣ (/ʂ~ɕ~ʃ/) have an underdot. Two letters have an overdot: ṁ and ṅ (/ŋ/). One has an acute accent: ś (/ʃ/). One letter has a line below: ḻ (/ɭ/) (Vedic).
In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents.In English, aspirated consonants are allophones in complementary distribution with their unaspirated counterparts, but in some other languages, notably most South Asian languages and East Asian languages, the difference is contrastive.
Most American, Canadian, and Australian speakers of English would pronounce the /t/ in the word little as a tap and the initial /l/ as a dark L (often represented as [ɫ]), but speakers in southern England pronounce the /t/ as (a glottal stop; see t-glottalization) and the second /l/ as a vowel resembling (L-vocalization).