In Tamil, there are 247 characters. The Tamil alphabet has 12 vowels and 18 consonants. These combine to form 216 compound characters. There is one special character (Aaytha ezutthu), giving a total of 247 characters.

The vowels are divided into short and long (five of each type) and two dipthongs. The consonants are classified into three categories with 6 in each category: vallinam - hard, mellinam - soft or nasal, and idayinam - medium. Unlike Devanagari, Tamil has neither conjunct consonants nor aspirated and voiced stops. Some scholars have suggested that in Sentamil (which refers to Tamil as it existed before Sanskrit words were borrowed), stops were voiceless when at the start of a word and unvoiced otherwise. However, no such distinction is observed by modern Tamil speakers.

The script is sometimes called Vattezhuthu, literally "round writing". This characterstic has partly to do with the fact that in ancient times, writing involved carving with a sharp point on palm leaves (olaichuvadi) and it was apparently easier to produce curves than straight lines by this method. The script is syllabic, in the sense that each letter is a syllable. However, the signs for the syllables are derived from that of the inherent consonant; thus it is of the abugida type. Some syllables are written by modifying the shape of the consonant in a way that is inherent to the vowel, others are written by adding vowel-inherent suffix to the consonant, yet others a prefix, and finally some vowels require adding both a prefix and a suffix to the consonant. In every case the vowel symbol is different from the vowel standing alone. An overdot (see image) - equivalent to Devanagari sign virama - suppresses the inherent trailing a sound of the consonant sign - that is, it is a pure consonant.

There are some lexical rules for formation of words. Some examples: a word cannot end in certain consonants, and cannot begin with some consonants including 'r' 'l' and 'll'; there are two consonants for the dental 'n' - which one should be used depends on whether the 'n' occurs at the start of the word and on the letters around it.

The Tamil letters

Carnatic Music

Tamil letters are also used to indicate the notes of Carnatic music. The notes are:

The 'values' of the note here can be taken to mean semitones. There is some overlap between the possible values - this eventually leads to the octave containing 12 semitones, as in Western music. See Carnatic music for a more complete discussion of this.

One can see from the names of the notes that they are borrowed from Sanskrit.

Tamil in Unicode

The Unicode range for Tamil is U+0B80 ... U+0BFF.

See also

• Brahmic family

References

• Phonetics of spoken Tamil
• The Unicode book - South and Southeast Asian scripts (pdf file)

Todo: list the vowels and consonants and describe them