Since I saw comments that the earlier image was not clear enough, I am posting the poem again, with each page in a different image file. I hope this is better.
I mentioned the doubt I had with the two Na's in the previous post. I think I should clarify it a little since it seems to have created some confusion. I was talking of ந and ன, not ன and ண. Both ந and ன I later discovered are 'Mellinam', and are in fact pronounced identically (both have the same IPA symbol, [n]), contrary to my earlier post which concluded that one of them was more alveolar and the other more dental, and they are distinguished based purely on lexical rules. Phonetics wise, having two of them is a redundancy.
For anyone who is interested Wikipedia has an excellent explanation of Tamil script in scientific and linguistic terms.
7 comments:
great stuff considering u're writing after so long! ur writing looks the same tho' :)
i've always wondered about the redundancies in the tamil alphabet too (obviously), and add to it, the lack of certain other sounds... (mahapranas etc) just goes to show that its a very primitive language i guess.
Impressive, considering that you say you're writing in thamizh after 15 years! A few spelling mistakes, though, but on the overall it's quite clean. And the writing seems "steady"; I remember how my pen would seem to have a mind of its own whenever I put pen to paper after just two months of summer holidays while at school!
(Of course, I didn't understand what you said to mean that you NEVER wrote a word in ANY language in all these fifteen years; but, that's just too long a period of not being in touch with making those little squiggles in "a particular language", and I, for one, would've found my pen going to London when I want it to go to Tokyo.) :)
(And oh, the concept is interesting, needless to say. I'm talking only about the "writing" here—literally, that is—and not the composing.)
Liked this from the previous post: 'But my mom managed to squeeze some Tamil alphabet into my head, with "you *must* know to read and write your mother tongue!"'
Wish we had more such people. :)
And this one made me feel guilty: 'Man, she also made me take Kannada lessons with "you *must* know to read and write your regional language", so I have that alphabet squeezed into my brain too!' :(
This post and Sindhu's comment up there started a mini-battle between us, a sort of friendly fire :) if you can call it that, and I'm sure Sindhu is bugged with me at the moment, with a paper submission just 'round the corner! :-/
I'm wondering if I should post a comment or reopen my now-defunct blog and post a full-length entry on certain of these things. There's so much to write!
And, kindly do remember to correct those spelling mistakes when you make another copy of this! :)
Hi Vijay,
Thanks for stopping by and sharing your thoughts. :)
How did you like the poetry?
-Sumi
@sindhu
About the "primitive" bit- it takes us to an interesint question concerning philosophy of language.
What makes a language powerful? What makes it expressive? What makes it beautiful? What makes it adaptable and flexible (a. with respect to growing and changing vocabulary, b. with respect to modifying for typeset etc. to cope with technological changes)?
In short, it's hard to quialify a language as "primitive" or "adavanced" based on just one or two attributes.
May be you meant primitive as in old ? Not sure.
About the lack of mahapranas, I can kind of understand the fact that some sounds are just not present in some languages. This is the reason linguists try to analyze various languages to come up with a common notation of different sounds (as in the IPA). There are hundreds of sounds that we can never produce - like certain types of R's in French, some Ka's in Arabic etc., even the special Ka represented by 'Q' when writing in English, in Urdu, and then the African clicks.
Some of these however minutely you try to observe you can't even follow or tell the difference between two different sounds that a native speaker naturally understands.
In short, no language has all possible sounds that the human anatomy can produce anyway. If the size of the subset that is included in a certain language is an attribute that determines how primitive or adavnced it is, then : is that a valid attribute to consider?
I am not answering these questions. They are quite hard.
And what about languages like Chinese then which don't even have a phonetic script but a pictographic one with an insane number of characters (letters) in the alphabet? Are those primitive or adavanced?
Interesting questions...
however, I must add that the Na redundancy and the common letters for voiced and unvoiced equivalent consonants (like Ta and Da, Pa and Ba) goes to say that it is not as scientific as it could be.
Hey,
Meant to post a reply quite a while back and then forgot all about it, thanks to bls-related pressures.
Yeah, liked the poem for quite a few things.
For one, the third line "aiyam emakkillai em dheivam avaiyae" touches upon so many things in a few words, from AIT (remember, Aryans were nature worshippers?), to the intermingling of cultures in what has now come to be India, to the origins of Vedic religion, to so many other things, the common strand being Nature worship.
Another thing is about the order. From the most abstract to the most concrete (sky, air, fire, water, land). That this order has been consciously followed is corroborated by the lines: "aimboodhangaLin pariNaama ezhuchchi dhanil/aindhaam nilaiyil amaindha nilamae".
Yet another thing is the subtly expressed idea about eco-conservation:
"ninnaip paadhukaaththup pOtri" (for nilam);
"vaazhkkaiyil maenmaiyutru maempaduththuvOm unaiyum" (for neer);
"aikkiyappattu nindru avatraip paeNuvOm" (in the intro)
And, I'm not even going to talk about all the associations the different stanzas, talking about the different elements, bring to my mind. :)
Hey Vijay, Thanks for the comments. :-) I conveyed to my mom.
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