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Except in poetry, the subject precedes the object, and the verb concludes the sentence. In a standard sentence, therefore, the order is usually subject–object–verb (SOV), but object–subject–verb is also common. Tamil is a null-subject language. Not all Tamil sentences have subjects, verbs, and objects.
Tamil being a strongly head-final language, the basic word-order is SOV. However, since it is highly inflected, word order is flexible and is used for pragmatic purposes. That is, fronting a word in a sentence adds emphasis on it; for instance, a VSO order would indicate greater emphasis on the verb, the action, than on the subject or the object.
An example of SVO order in English is: Andy ate cereal. In an analytic language such as English, subject–verb–object order is relatively inflexible because it identifies which part of the sentence is the subject and which one is the object. ("The dog bit Andy" and "Andy bit the dog" mean two completely different things, while, in case of ...
The syntax of written Tamil has also changed, with the introduction of new aspectual auxiliaries and more complex sentence structures, and with the emergence of a more rigid word order that resembles the syntactic argument structure of English.
In linguistic typology, a verb–subject–object (VSO) language has its most typical sentences arrange their elements in that order, as in Ate Sam apples (Sam ate apples). VSO is the third-most common word order among the world's languages, [1] after SOV (as in Hindi and Japanese) and SVO (as in English and Mandarin Chinese).
Peacock, a type of bird; from Old English pawa, the earlier etymology is uncertain, but one possible source is Tamil tokei (தோகை) "peacock feather", via Latin or Greek [37] Sambal, a spicy condiment; from Malay, which may have borrowed the word from a Dravidian language [38] such as Tamil (சம்பல்) or Telugu (సంబల్).
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]
A study of code switching in everyday speech in Tamil Nadu found that English words are commonly inserted into sentences that otherwise follow Tamil syntax. [12]A characteristic of Tanglish or Tamil-English code-switching is the addition of Tamil affixes to English words. [12]