Re: [indic] Re: Tamil Anusvara (U+0B82) glyph shape [ Re: Dot position in Gurmukhi character U+0A33]

From: Michael Everson <everson_at_evertype.com>
Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2012 11:49:35 -0800

On 9 Feb 2012, at 11:34, Sinnathurai Srivas wrote:

> To my knowledge, in day to day usage Tamil uses far more sounds than any language in the world.

Nope.

> So Tamil uses far more phoneme for any language.

Sorry, but this simply isn't true. For instance Tamil has 10 vowels [iː ɪ eː ɛ uː ʊ oː ɔ aː ə], but RP English has 12, and Australian English has 14. Tsez for instance has 31 consonant phonemes; Tamil has 14, though some more if you count foreign borrowed sounds and some allophones. It would be easy to find more examples of languages with many vowels and many consonants.

> Most importantly to my knowledge, only Tamil grammar that defines what is alphabet and how to use them.

Tamil can be written in Latin and Devanagari and other scripts, if one wants to transliterate it.

I'm not going to comment more on this, but you might consider doing some research on linguistic diversity before making the kinds of claims you are making about Tamil.

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
Received on Thu Feb 09 2012 - 13:52:36 CST

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