Thamizh Alphabet Ought to be Reduced by 13 letters, to 234

 

Thamizh Alphabet Ought to be Reduced by 13 letters, to 234

The use of the word “ought” in the title is deliberate. The sentiment expressed therein takes on the hue of Kantian “Moral Imperative.” Moral imperatives, per Kant, ought to be followed by everyone, no exceptions. That is the stress I have laid in the heading and develop my argument in this post per that, “ought”

My friends who are not aware of the classification of Thamizh letters are taken aback when I say that there are 247 letters in the alphabet. Compare that to Sanskrit, the counting stops at 42, or if you wish to take Sanskrit closer to Thamizh in this metric, it is 63; at best, Sanskrit has only about 26% vis-a-vis Tamizh. It does not make Thamizh any superior to Sanskrit, let me assert; the reason is, the metric is flawed.

Going beyond the above, and focusing on how far we can reduce the number of letters in Thamizh, we may begin with 31. What are these 31 letters? I am not going to write them out, but will say that these are the 12 vowels, the 18 consonants plus the letter that supposedly modifies the sound of a few letters, the three dots (marking the apexes of an equilateral triangle, as in அஃக்து  (the bold letter). This could be taken to be equivalent to the deep-throat (guttural) sound in Arabic).

But, here is where Thamizh distinguishes itself from the other languages (excepting perhaps Chinese Mandarin, Wu and Yue, and Japanese about which I am blissfully and completely ignorant; the languages of natives of all the lands who have chosen to retain their languages, including the geographical grouping called the  Andamanese, the tropical forest dwellers in Brazil, Indonesia and other places ...). Thamizh people learn at school the total number of letters in their language is, 12+18+12*18+1 = 247.

English has five vowels, and 21 consonants. Ignore the ambiguous vowel sound of  "y". We may say that German language could be thought of as having more than two types if the diacritical mark, a double dot (^..) on top of a consonant is taken as separate from the other two.  Or, if a German wished to go one up on English, she could resort to calling the double ‘s’ written as β as another letter, nobody should object. Yet, they do not come any closer to Thamizh.

Thamizh has a third type of letters, called consonanto-vowels, that gives numerical superiority in this counting exercise. For every consonant, its combination with each and every vowel produces a consonanto-vowel, which is counted as distinct from both the consonant and the vowel that go to make that letter. This is how school kids learn that Thamizh has 247 letters. For example, the sound produced by combining the consonant ‘k’ with the vowel ‘a’ is a consonanto-vowel, ‘ka’. This is a distinct letter. Then we have 18 x 12 = 216 consonanto-vowels.

In writing, Thamizh modifies the base consonant by a vowel as per the sound to be produced. Sound cannot be produced by a consonant alone. That is why, in Thamizh a consonant is called “ a body letter, மெய் எழுத்து (look at the second letter in the second word which, as far as I know is unique to Thamizh and Malayalam a severe retroflex, the tongue curled to touch the inside upper palate). It takes a vowel (literally life, Thamizh classifies vowels as உயிர் எழுத்து), to make a consonant come alive, to let the air blow out of the speaker’s mouth.

If you take exception to the above, hear how Daniel Craig says his name: “James Bondu” Yes, he leaves an almost indistinguishable “oo” sound at the end. Enlarge the word “Bondu” to see the “oo” And, the ending “s” in his first name segues into the first two letters of the next word and comes out as, “sbo”. Believe me, I am not stretching to justify my thesis. I have not done the same with the other actors in their Bond roles. This is why the Thamizh poet  Subrahmanya Bharathiyar wrote, “சுந்தர தெலுங்கினில்”, calling Thelungu as beautiful, as Thelungu prohibits a word from ending in an consonant; that would be too abrupt and jarring to the ears of the Thelungu people (this beautiful proscription is being regressively forgotten by the natives in their pronunciation of words of non-native languages; so sad).

Every language can number the words in its alphabet any way it pleases. I do not know how the French do it, and I do not care. What they say is the truth. After all, it is their language! And, there truly cannot be any competition based on the number of letters in a language howsoever the natives count it.

Thamizh’s 247 word alphabet is neither superior nor inferior to any other language in this respect. Now, I come to the reducing the number of letters in Thamizh.

The “zh” combination I have used is the severely retroflexive “ழ்”. Most Thamizh people themselves are substituting “ழ்” with “ல்”, the “l” sound common to all languages, I would think. Their “Thamizh” becomes “Tamil”. I do not blame them.

Going back six decades, there were discussions about how to change the name of the state “Madras” to make it more relevant to the identity of the area, the people and their language. “Thamizh, தமிழ்” was too difficult for most non-Thamizh people, even “Thamil, தமில்” would have been difficult for the English as “Th” is a sibilant sound for them and non-sibilant for Thamizh people. So they settled on “Tamil, டமில்”.

So, with the letter, “ழ்” finding vanishingly small usage in the spoken language, it should be discarded. So, one consonant less and 12 consonanto-vowels less; in all 13 letters less.

Malayalis are far better in this regard, they care two hoots for the difficulty of the others. There, it is “zh” in Malayalam-to-English transliteration.

Raghuram Ekambaram