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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 .
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.
Extended-Tamil script or Tamil-Grantha refers to a script used to write the Tamil language before the 20th century Tamil purist movement. [1] Tamil-Grantha is a mixed-script: a combination of the conservative-Tamil script that independently evolved from pre-Pallava script, combined with consonants imported from a later-stage evolved Grantha script (from Pallava-Grantha) to write non-Tamil ...
Tamil-Brahmi, also known as Tamili or Damili, [3] was a variant of the Brahmi script in southern India. It was used to write inscriptions in Old Tamil. [4] The Tamil-Brahmi script has been paleographically and stratigraphically dated between the third century BCE and the first century CE, and it constitutes the earliest known writing system evidenced in many parts of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra ...
Old Tamil’s writing system fits under the abugida. The letters in the Old Tamil abugida all appear to take the form of shapes like squares and circles. [37] In the language every consonant is combined with a vowel for example NA is the letter n in the English alphabet.
In modern times, the Tamil-Grantha script is used in religious contexts by Tamil-speaking Hindus. For example, they use the script to write a child's name for the first time during the naming ceremony, for the Sanskrit portion of traditional wedding cards, and for announcements of a person's last rites. It is also used in many religious ...
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.
Pallavas developed the Pallava script based on Tamil-Brahmi. The main characteristics of the newer script are aesthetically matched and fuller consonant glyphs, similarly visible in the writing systems of Chalukya, [16] Kadamba, and Vengi at the time of Ikshvakus. Brahmi's design was slightly different from the scripts of Cholas, Pandyas, and ...