This page is within the scope of theWikipedia Help Project, a collaborative effort to improve Wikipedia's help documentation for readers and contributors. If you would like to participate, please visitthe project page, where you can join thediscussion and see a list of open tasks. To browse help related resources see theHelp Menu orHelp Directory. Orask for help on your talk page and a volunteer will visit you there.Wikipedia HelpWikipedia:Help ProjectTemplate:Wikipedia Help ProjectHelp
This page is within the scope ofWikiProject Linguistics, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage oflinguistics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can jointhe discussion and see a list of open tasks.LinguisticsWikipedia:WikiProject LinguisticsTemplate:WikiProject LinguisticsLinguistics
It would be ideal to add a figure like the one at right to explain about the place of articulationPlaces of articulation.Key: Places of articulation (passive & active): 1. Exo-labial, 2. Endo-labial, 3. Dental, 4. Alveolar, 5. Post-alveolar, 6. Pre-palatal, 7. Palatal, 8. Velar, 9. Uvular, 10. Pharyngeal, 11. Glottal, 12. Epiglottal, 13. Radical, 14. Postero-dorsal, 15. Antero-dorsal, 16. Laminal, 17. Apical, 18. Sub-apical.. --C.R.Selvakumar (talk)18:04, 17 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Yes,[ʋ] is a better approximation for வ. About the clarifications sought for the rules, see Dr. S. Paramasivam, "naṟṟamiḻ ilakkaṇam" pages 122-129 (in Tamil). In Tamil k, c, ṭ, t, p, are called valliṉam ("hard" consonants), and they become soft only if they are preceded by a "soft" consonant or in the absence of a hard consonant in the intervocalic positions. There are clear rules as to what letters can and can not come as the first letter of a word used in Tamil, how long (the duration) each Tamil letter is to be pronounced and when they get shortened by half or by one quarter etc. Native speaker with a basic grounding in the language know these without elaborate rules. I thinkKamil Zvelebil also had said these somewhere. --C.R.Selvakumar (talk)01:41, 19 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, you're right, the "hard" consonants are voiceless stops. The remaining consonants are formally defined under two other classes of consonants- they are called "melliṉam" ("soft"): ṅa, ña, ṇa, na, ma, ṉa and the other is called "iṭaiyiṉam" ("intermediate"): ya, ra, la, va, ḻa, ḷa.; Thus the 18 consonants are divided into three classes, each with 6 members. --C.R.Selvakumar (talk)23:06, 19 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Not just voiceless stops, correct? Tamil "hard" consonants are voiced intervocalically. Are they really considered a separate class of consonant when they do that? —kwami (talk)04:23, 29 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Regarding ஔ the description, "somewhat likehouse" is the best that can be said. Somewhat like round, bound, out, outer, rowdy (Webster says \ˈrau̇-dē\). When pronouncing ஔ, I think the lips are a bit more rounded.--C.R.Selvakumar (talk)17:20, 28 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for your comment, but do try to understand that there is no simple RP for Tamil த. In Tamil it is dental and not alveolar and it is not a fricative θ,ð. I do not believe it is like t instable! I tried to edit it because many entries were patently wrong. For example வ. It is not a bilabial phoneme or a fricative.--C.R.Selvakumar (talk)17:45, 17 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Well, if வ is neither bilabial nor fricative, then /β/ (voiced bilabial fricative) is not the correct IPA character for it, and the chart is wrong.
Some articles in WP have a different phonetic code for Tamil, other than the one described here in this article's 'help for Tamil IPA' page. They may be based on the following from WP.1) These tables have easier grouping of letters.Source:Tamil_script#Letters.Diff's version at retrieval
Unlike most other Indian languages, Tamil does not haveaspirated consonants. The Tamil script does not have distinct letters forvoiced and unvoicedstop, although both are present in the spoken language asallophones—i.e., they are incomplementary distribution and the places they can occur do not intersect. For example, the voiceless stop[p] occurs at the beginning of the words and the voiced stop[b] cannot. In the middle of words, voiceless stops commonly occur as ageminated pair like -pp-, while voiced stops usually do not. Only the voiced stops occur after a vowel, or after a corresponding nasal. Thus both the voiced and voiceless stops can be represented by the same script in Tamil without ambiguity, the script denoting only the place and broad manner of articulation (stop,nasal, etc.). The Tolkāppiyam cites detailed rules as to when a letter is to be pronounced with voice and when it is to be pronounced unvoiced. The rule is identical for all stops.
With the exception of one rule - the pronunciation of the letterc at the beginning of a word - these rules are largely followed even today in pronouncingcentamil.
Steever, Sanford B. (1996), "Tamil Writing", in Bright, William R.; Daniels, Peter B. (eds.),The World's Writing Systems, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 426–430,ISBN0-19-507993-0
Annamalai, E.; Steever, S.B. (1998), "Modern Tamil", in Steever, Sanford (ed.),The Dravidian Languages, London: Routledge, pp. 100–128,ISBN0-415-10023-2
Keane, Elinor (2004), "Tamil",Journal of the International Phonetic Association,34 (1):111–116,doi:10.1017/S0025100304001549
I've reformatted the table and took out a lot of unnecessary notes. The table had an unnecessary extra column indicating the symbols used for a sound when the examples column could accomplish this. This page was formerly too centered around teaching the orthography, but these IPA for X tables are designed to help readers understand our IPA transcriptions and editors to know our conventions, so I took out most of the orthographic notes. Readers wanting to know the sound-to-grapheme correspondence of Tamil are better served by going toTamil script. If an editor is so unfamiliar with Tamil that they don't know these sound-to-grapheme correspondences, they probably shouldn't be providing IPA transcriptions in the first place. I didn't attempt to fill out the corresponding ISO romanization, but that would be helpful. —Ƶ§œš¹[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]16:51, 1 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Tamil does not contrast [n̪] and alveolar [n], even though speakers may claim so
They certainly don't in spoken Tamil(Schiffman, p. 8), and even in literary Tamil they occur in complementary distribution(word-initially dental and otherwise alveolar), and there's no decent evidence to prove they are different(Steever (1998: 14, 16)).— Precedingunsigned comment added bySourceIsOpen (talk •contribs)12:15, 23 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
They don'tcontrast per se (as you note with literary Tamil, although the dental nasal occurs word-medially before [d̪] and [t̪] and in compounds or derived words like ஓநாய்), but they are certainly both present in my dialect, for what it is worth (similarly to [ɻ] and [ɭ], also contra Schiffman). They are also both present in high-prestige spoken Tamil, and I think this is the best variety to represent in transcriptions (similarly to how we shouldn't be using [ˈt̪ɐ.mɪɭ] for [ˈt̪ɐ.mɪɻ].
I think it is worth noting that Help:IPA/Malayalam separates [d̪] from [d], even though they also are in complementary distribution, and additionally that [d̪ʱ] features the diacritic despite there being no alveolar counterpart.Takkāḷi (talk)22:28, 31 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Some other things I noticed peculiar: ப is intervocalically a fricative and a stop only postnasally, [h] is dialectal and for most people it is [ɣ], [x] is incredibly archaic and was only used in Old Tamil, [ʂ] doesn't really exist, and [a] should be [ɐ] or [ə].SourceIsOpen (talk)12:23, 23 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I am in strong agreement regarding the representation of short vowels and plan to make a separate comment about this, but it seems silly to me to provide narrow transcriptions that aren't actually accurate to pronunciation! I don't think there is a single dialect in which அ is [a], இ is [i], and உ is [u], and I don't know that this was ever the case historically. I also find it strange that the English approximation column correctly has 'bet' and 'foot' but incorrectly 'papa,' 'machine,' and 'story.' It is also worth differentiating word-final [i] from word-medial and word-initial [ɪ].Takkāḷi (talk)22:34, 31 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Tamil has [dr]([dɹ] for some speakers) and [tr](also [tɹ] for some speakers), so I think the dental should be distinguished
The [d] and [t] in nṟ and ṟṟ are alveolar for some speakers as shown in the page. This should mean that [d] and [t] should be specified to be dental instead, right?@Broman178: -SourceIsOpen (talk)19:12, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Unless Tamil makes a contrast between dental and alveolar stops, there's no need to have the dental diacritic. The idea is that such a diacritic is designed to mark a distinction and no such distinction is made here. —Ƶ§œš¹[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]00:21, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Although I will admit I have a preference for the dental diacritics to be featured, I agree with Aeusoes1, because alveolar stops (even if a few speakers may use them) are not a main individual phoneme or even allophone of Tamil (rather than occurring as [dr] and [tr] clusters) and as a result, there's no point to really add the diacritic. In any case, most of the IPA help pages across Wikipedia exclude the dental diacritic even for those languages (likeFrench,Spanish andHindi) which have the dental stops, so its probably best to be consistent with that. What I probably would suggest instead regarding [dr] and [tr] is that you could mention in the footnote that they are alveolar for some speakers.Broman178 (talk)08:57, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
My edit yesterday to remove the dental stop diacritics from transcription got reverted byNardog on the basis that it was agreed to keep the diacritics due to the nasals being distinguished here (this just makes the reasoning for excluding the dental diacritics in IPA pages much more meaningless now for which I'm actually planning a discussion on this matter later in the main WikiProject Linguistics talk page). However, I can't see any sign of agreement on that basis, having looked at most of the talk pages here. If you are around Nardog, can you please clarify where the discussion is to keep the diacritics in this IPA Help page to me and if this was recent, otherwise your revert of my edit yesterday doesn't make much sense to me?Broman178 (talk)08:59, 25 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Broman178:Help talk:IPA/Hindi and Urdu/Archive 2#Dental diacritic is what I was thinking of. Tamil only gets a passing mention, but we (Kbb2,Aeusoes1 and I) endorsed the use of the diacritic in Malayalam /d̪, t̪ʰ, d̪ʱ/ even though they don't contrast with alveolar because /t̪/ and /t/ contrast in that language. Granted, Tamil is not as clear-cut a case as Malayalam given plosives and nasals are not exactly the same manner of articulation—but occlusives nonetheless. I can see either way. The conversation above from April may constitute a consensus, so go ahead and remove the diacritic if you wish.Nardog (talk)16:04, 25 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for your reply Nardog, I see where you mean about this but because there is no consensus on this talk page to keep the diacritics (especially as this latest discussion here leans more on agreeing to exclude the diacritics), I think I'll remove the diacritics again from the stops.Broman178 (talk)20:11, 25 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I saw that ஃக [x], ஃப [f], and ஃஜ [z] are transcribed as ⟨ḵk⟩, ⟨ḵp⟩, ⟨ḵj⟩ in ISO 15919 due to the use of the āytam ஃ; however, given that the āytam is being used in a similar manner to the nuqta in other Indic scripts, I propose that we use ⟨k͟h⟩, ⟨f⟩, ⟨z⟩ instead, consistent with how ख़, फ़, ज़ are transcribed.
