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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.
The rules of pronunciation given in the Tolkāppiyam, a text on the grammar of old Tamil, says that the āytam in old Tamil patterned with semivowels and it occurred after a short vowel and before a stop; it either lengthened the previous vowel, geminated the stop or was lost if the following segment is phonetically voiced in the environment. [26]
The Tamil letters thereafter evolved towards a more rounded form and by the 5th or 6th century, they had reached a form called the early vaṭṭeḻuttu. [10] The modern Tamil script does not, however, descend from that script. [11]
Signs below a letter English cow [kʰaʊ̯], koi [kʰɔɪ̯] This vowel does not form a syllable of its own, but runs into the vowel next to it. (In English, the diacritic is generally left off: [kaʊ].) English boy [b̥ɔɪ̯], doe [d̥oʊ̯] Sounds like a loud whisper; [n̥] is like a whispered breath through the nose.
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 .
Tamil words consist of a lexical root to which one or more affixes are attached. Most Tamil affixes are suffixes. Tamil suffixes can be derivational suffixes, which either change the part of speech of the word or its meaning, or inflectional suffixes, which mark categories such as person, number, mood, tense, etc.
Regarding your edits to this page: you should know that using Indian English phonology as an "English equivalent" can be very misleading for most anglophones. Please use a more standard equivalent, like Received Pronunciation or American English, in the future. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 162.129.251.22 16:48, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
Tamil has a numeric prefix for each number from 1 to 9, which can be added to the words for the powers of ten (ten, hundred, thousand, etc.) to form multiples of them. For instance, the word for fifty, ஐம்பது ( aimpatu ) is a combination of ஐ ( ai , the prefix for five) and பத்து ( pattu , which is ten).