E-Book Overview
Date: 2001Number of pages: 31We often marvel at the capacity of children, even before schooling, to pick up a language of their surroundings. This is because they are not unduly bothered by alphabet or by glossy textbooks. All they do is to imitate the sound they hear around and the context in which the sounds are made. In a short period of time, they start speaking the language.Sound plays a vital part in the process of learning languages. As the children grow, they gather a bigger vocabulary of words and expressions by sheer association. This is the method we shall employ in our effort to learn to speak in Tamil. The sounds we shall use are sounds which we are familiar with i.e. letters of the Roman alphabet. The lessons which follow are meant for those who are familiar with English language. If we went by conventional way of learning Tamil, mastering the letters of the Tamil alphabet might take weeks or even months because there are nearly 250 lettersymbols in it. Whereas our new method of learning through Roman alphabet does not involve learning any new letters. We simply have to employ only 39 characters, of which 23 are roman letters which we already know and the remaining 16 are some of the same letters but with diacritical marks above them. Diacritical marks are signs which are used to differentiate between the different values of the same letter. Therefore, we should have no difficulty in using the roman letters as tools to familiarise ourselves with the sounds of Tamil words. Of the 26 letters, we leave out three – q, w and x – and on 12 of the remaining 23, we shall use diacritical signs. The total comes to39. Every letter in spoken Tamil is covered within these 39 symbols.
E-Book Content
Spoken Tamil through Roman Alphabet Lessons planned by K.Kasturi & Siddesh Mukundan Introduction We often marvel at the capacity of children, even before schooling, to pick up a language of their surroundings. This is because they are not unduly bothered by alphabet or by glossy textbooks. All they do is to imitate the sound they hear around and the context in which the sounds are made. In a short period of time, they start speaking the language. Sound plays a vital part in the process of learning languages. As the children grow, they gather a bigger vocabulary of words and expressions by sheer association. This is the method we shall employ in our effort to learn to speak in Tamil. The sounds we shall use are sounds which we are familiar with i.e. letters of the Roman alphabet. The lessons which follow are meant for those who are familiar with English language. If we went by conventional way of learning Tamil, mastering the letters of the Tamil alphabet might take weeks or even months because there are nearly 250 lettersymbols in it. Whereas our new method of learning through Roman alphabet does not involve learning any new letters. We simply have to employ only 39 characters, of which 23 are roman letters which we already know and the remaining 16 are some of the same letters but with diacritical marks above them. Diacritical marks are signs which are used to differentiate between the different values of the same letter. Therefore, we should have no difficulty in using the roman letters as tools to familiarise ourselves with the sounds of Tamil words. Of the 26 letters, we leave out three – q, w and x – and on 12 of the remaining 23, we shall use diacritical signs. The total comes to 39. Every letter in spoken Tamil is covered within these 39 symbols. What the phonetic value of each of these characters is, is given in Lesson 1. Contents Lesson Page 1. Romanized Tamil alphabet and their phonetic values . . 1 2. Glossary of nouns and verbs in Tamil . . . .