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Tamil is a Dravidian language that is spoken mainly in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. It is one of the classical languages of the world, with a rich literature spanning over 2000 years. It is claimed that classical Tamil is incomprehensible to speakers of the modern language.
Tamil evolved independently of Sanskrit (which belongs to a distinct linguistic family), but has borrowed a number of words from it in later centuries. It has a rather small phoneme set. Like most writing systems in India, it is phonetic in nature - characters represent sounds, and it is syllabic. It means that in this script, the sounds of a word are first grouped into syllables and only then each syllable is written with a corresponding compound character. There are characters for separate vowels and consonants too.
The rules of reading are much simpler than those of English.
The 'l' in the word 'Tamil' is pronounced like a retroflex 'r', though it is usually transliterated as "zh".
Tamil is an official language in the following countries:
See also:
External links:
Kalaivani, a Malaysian Tamil Information Exchange ;
Tamil inayam offers Learn Basic Tamil; Tamil inayam offers Learn Spoken Tamil; Tamil Inayam offers Basic Tamil Dictionary;
University of Pennsylvania provides web based courses for learning and teaching Tamil;
Tamil virtual University has the largest digitalised tamil literature and web based courses for learning and teaching Tamil
To do:
- Add IPA symbol for Tamil l