Help talk:IPA/Tamil

Incorrect entry
The table says "β 	வ 	van to water". It is not a bilabial phoneme and not related to Spanish "b" either. It is not fricative either. --C.R.Selvakumar (talk) 17:28, 17 July 2012 (UTC)


 * It would be ideal to add a figure like the one at right to explain about the place of articulation Places of articulation.svg. --C.R.Selvakumar (talk) 18:04, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Tamil language transcribes the sound as, a labiodental approximant. — Æµ§œš¹  [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]  19:23, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes, is a better approximation for வ. About the clarifications sought for the rules, see Dr. S. Paramasivam, "naṟṟamiḻ ilakkaṇam" pages 122-129 (in Tamil). In Tamil k, c, ṭ, t, p, are called valliṉam ("hard" consonants), and they become soft only if they are preceded by a "soft" consonant or in the absence of a hard consonant in the intervocalic positions. There are clear rules as to what letters can and can not come as the first letter of a word used in Tamil, how long (the duration) each Tamil letter is to be pronounced and when they get shortened by half or by one quarter etc. Native speaker with a basic grounding in the language know these without elaborate rules. I think Kamil Zvelebil also had said these somewhere. --C.R.Selvakumar (talk) 01:41, 19 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Okay, so "hard" consonants are voiceless stops then, right? Are the remainder of consonants "soft"? — Æµ§œš¹  [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]  02:07, 19 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes, you're right, the "hard" consonants are voiceless stops. The remaining consonants are formally defined under two other classes of consonants- they are called "melliṉam" ("soft"): ṅa, ña, ṇa, na, ma, ṉa and the other is called "iṭaiyiṉam" ("intermediate"): ya, ra, la, va, ḻa, ḷa.; Thus the 18 consonants are divided into three classes, each with 6 members. --C.R.Selvakumar (talk) 23:06, 19 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Not just voiceless stops, correct? Tamil "hard" consonants are voiced intervocalically. Are they really considered a separate class of consonant when they do that? — kwami (talk) 04:23, 29 July 2012 (UTC)


 * Regarding ஔ the description, "somewhat like house" is the best that can be said. Somewhat like round, bound, out, outer, rowdy  (Webster says \ˈrau̇-dē\). When pronouncing ஔ, I think the lips are a bit more rounded.--C.R.Selvakumar (talk) 17:20, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia:IPA for Tamil
Useful discussion from User talk:C.R.Selvakumar copied by contributor 2know4power (talk) 05:37, 8 February 2017 (UTC), given below:

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 (talk) 16:48, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your comment, but do try to understand that there is no simple RP for Tamil த. In Tamil it is dental and not alveolar and it is not a fricative θ,ð. I do not believe it is like t in stable! I tried to edit it because many entries were patently wrong. For example வ. It is not a bilabial phoneme or a fricative.--C.R.Selvakumar (talk) 17:45, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

Well, if வ is neither bilabial nor fricative, then /β/ (voiced bilabial fricative) is not the correct IPA character for it, and the chart is wrong.

I understand that த is dental. That is why I put "with the tongue touching the back of the front teeth" as a pronunciation tip. It is not pronounced like the "th" in "then" or "there". That is a voiced dental fricative, /ð/. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 162.129.251.22 (talk) 14:36, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Useful tables with other similar phonetic codes
Some articles in WP have a different phonetic code for Tamil, other than the one described here in this article's 'help for Tamil IPA' page. They may be based on the following from WP. 1) These tables have easier grouping of letters.Source:Tamil_script. | Diff's version at retrieval

Consonants table
Table: Tamil consonants with ISO 15919, IPA

Grantha consonants in Tamil
Table: Grantha consonants in Tamil with IPA.

Vowels table
Table: Vowels with IPA.

Charts with Tamil script and phonetics
Source: Tamil_language. | Diff's version at retrieval

A chart of the Tamil consonants with IPA phonetics :

Chart for Vowels:

Charts with phonetics
Source: Tamil_phonology. | Diff's version at retrieval

Stops were voiceless when at the start of a word and voiced allophonically otherwise.

A chart of the Tamil consonant phonemes in the International Phonetic Alphabet follows:


 * 1)  and  are allophones of  in some dialects.
 * 2)  and  are found only in loanwords and frequently replaced by native sounds.
 * 3)  and  are allophones of  in some dialects.

The voiceless consonants have multiple allophones, depending on position.

Allophones-unvoiced stops-voiced
Source: Tamil_phonology. | Diff's version at retrieval

Unlike most other Indian languages, Tamil does not have aspirated consonants. The Tamil script does not have distinct letters for voiced and unvoiced stop, although both are present in the spoken language as allophones—i.e., they are in complementary distribution and the places they can occur do not intersect. For example, the voiceless stop occurs at the beginning of the words and the voiced stop  cannot. In the middle of words, voiceless stops commonly occur as a geminated pair like -pp-, while voiced stops usually do not. Only the voiced stops occur after a vowel, or after a corresponding nasal. Thus both the voiced and voiceless stops can be represented by the same script in Tamil without ambiguity, the script denoting only the place and broad manner of articulation (stop, nasal, etc.). The Tolkāppiyam cites detailed rules as to when a letter is to be pronounced with voice and when it is to be pronounced unvoiced. The rule is identical for all stops.

With the exception of one rule - the pronunciation of the letter c at the beginning of a word - these rules are largely followed even today in pronouncing centamil.


 * These appear relevant for the talk page for 'Help-IPA for Tamil' in WP. Hope this is helpful for all.Thanks, by User 2know4power (talk) 15:19, 9 January 2017 (UTC).

Move discussion in progress
There is a move discussion in progress on Help talk:IPA which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 16:18, 15 July 2017 (UTC)

Table redesign
I've reformatted the table and took out a lot of unnecessary notes. The table had an unnecessary extra column indicating the symbols used for a sound when the examples column could accomplish this. This page was formerly too centered around teaching the orthography, but these IPA for X tables are designed to help readers understand our IPA transcriptions and editors to know our conventions, so I took out most of the orthographic notes. Readers wanting to know the sound-to-grapheme correspondence of Tamil are better served by going to Tamil script. If an editor is so unfamiliar with Tamil that they don't know these sound-to-grapheme correspondences, they probably shouldn't be providing IPA transcriptions in the first place. I didn't attempt to fill out the corresponding ISO romanization, but that would be helpful. — Æµ§œš¹  [lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt] 16:51, 1 August 2020 (UTC)

Tamil does not contrast [n̪] and alveolar [n], even though speakers may claim so
They certainly don't in spoken Tamil(Schiffman, p. 8), and even in literary Tamil they occur in complementary distribution(word-initially dental and otherwise alveolar), and there's no decent evidence to prove they are different(Steever (1998: 14, 16)). — Preceding unsigned comment added by SourceIsOpen (talk • contribs) 12:15, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

Some other things I noticed peculiar: ப is intervocalically a fricative and a stop only postnasally, [h] is dialectal and for most people it is [ɣ], [x] is incredibly archaic and was only used in Old Tamil, [ʂ] doesn't really exist, and [a] should be [ɐ] or [ə]. SourceIsOpen (talk) 12:23, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

Tamil has [dr]([dɹ] for some speakers) and [tr](also [tɹ] for some speakers), so I think the dental should be distinguished
The [d] and [t] in nṟ and ṟṟ are alveolar for some speakers as shown in the page. This should mean that [d] and [t] should be specified to be dental instead, right? - SourceIsOpen (talk) 19:12, 4 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Unless Tamil makes a contrast between dental and alveolar stops, there's no need to have the dental diacritic. The idea is that such a diacritic is designed to mark a distinction and no such distinction is made here. — Æµ§œš¹  [lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt] 00:21, 5 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Although I will admit I have a preference for the dental diacritics to be featured, I agree with Aeusoes1, because alveolar stops (even if a few speakers may use them) are not a main individual phoneme or even allophone of Tamil (rather than occurring as [dr] and [tr] clusters) and as a result, there's no point to really add the diacritic. In any case, most of the IPA help pages across Wikipedia exclude the dental diacritic even for those languages (like French, Spanish and Hindi) which have the dental stops, so its probably best to be consistent with that. What I probably would suggest instead regarding [dr] and [tr] is that you could mention in the footnote that they are alveolar for some speakers. Broman178 (talk) 08:57, 5 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Alright got it, thanks. I guess that works if other pages also follow this pattern, though that seems weird to me. - SourceIsOpen (talk) 13:30, 8 April 2021 (UTC)
 * My edit yesterday to remove the dental stop diacritics from transcription got reverted by Nardog on the basis that it was agreed to keep the diacritics due to the nasals being distinguished here (this just makes the reasoning for excluding the dental diacritics in IPA pages much more meaningless now for which I'm actually planning a discussion on this matter later in the main WikiProject Linguistics talk page). However, I can't see any sign of agreement on that basis, having looked at most of the talk pages here. If you are around Nardog, can you please clarify where the discussion is to keep the diacritics in this IPA Help page to me and if this was recent, otherwise your revert of my edit yesterday doesn't make much sense to me? Broman178 (talk) 08:59, 25 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Help talk:IPA/Hindi and Urdu/Archive 2 is what I was thinking of. Tamil only gets a passing mention, but we (Kbb2, Aeusoes1 and I) endorsed the use of the diacritic in Malayalam /d̪, t̪ʰ, d̪ʱ/ even though they don't contrast with alveolar because /t̪/ and /t/ contrast in that language. Granted, Tamil is not as clear-cut a case as Malayalam given plosives and nasals are not exactly the same manner of articulation—but occlusives nonetheless. I can see either way. The conversation above from April may constitute a consensus, so go ahead and remove the diacritic if you wish. Nardog (talk) 16:04, 25 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your reply Nardog, I see where you mean about this but because there is no consensus on this talk page to keep the diacritics (especially as this latest discussion here leans more on agreeing to exclude the diacritics), I think I'll remove the diacritics again from the stops. Broman178 (talk) 20:11, 25 June 2021 (UTC)

Marginal consonants
I saw that ஃக [x], ஃப [f], and ஃஜ [z] are transcribed as ⟨ḵk⟩, ⟨ḵp⟩, ⟨ḵj⟩ in ISO 15919 due to the use of the āytam ஃ; however, given that the āytam is being used in a similar manner to the nuqta in other Indic scripts, I propose that we use ⟨k͟h⟩, ⟨f⟩, ⟨z⟩ instead, consistent with how ख़, फ़, ज़ are transcribed.

I would also suggest moving these consonants into a separate "Marginal consonants" section, similar to what was done in Help:IPA/Punjabi, as they do not appear outside of loanwords from English/Arabic/etc. LethologicalLinguophile (talk) 20:33, 19 August 2023 (UTC)