User:Uanfala/South Indian spelling

Spelling in South India
Most languages of South Asia make a distinguish between dental and retroflex consonants, most commonly vs.,  vs. and vs. . The distinction is consistently  made in scholarly transliterations, where retroflex consonants are marked with an underdot, for example  for. But things get a bit murky when it gets to common everyday romanisation. A common practice in South India is to make avail of a following letter h to indicate a dental consonant: th for vs. t for. This is almost always applied to t, less often to d and never, as far as I know, to other consonants. This practice isn't followed in North India, probably because an h is already employed to mark aspirated consonants (t for vs. th vs. ). In the south such consonants are either absent (as in Tamil), or much less frequent.